I think there’s a difference between “stable” and “evolving”.
No, that's pretty much the Debian definition of "stable": software that doesn't need changing for multiple years. The Debian term "stable" has nothing to do with whether or not a program crashes regularly, but how often it requires maintenance. In that definition, "evolving" software indeed isn't "stable" (yet).
>Beyond Kubernetes, web browsers clearly fall into this category. Distributors have generally given up on trying to backport patches to older browser releases; they just move their users forward to new releases when they happen. The resources to do things any other way just do not exist.
Exceptions are already made for browsers, but they're browsers. They're practically essential to 99% of graphical debian installs and don't expose the really nasty unstable bits (like V8's api surface) to the world. I doubt the debian TC will make that exception for devops software with much less mindshare and a public API surface that is the software, at least not on the stable channel.
Debian just makes an exception for the Firefox and Chromium packages.
You can tell that is what the current maintainer was hoping for here. Instead, the previous maintainer-- who literally wrote that it would probably take two full-time devs to properly package this and maintain the package-- goes full Vogon and summons the great Debian bureaucracy to solve this with their poetry.
No, that's pretty much the Debian definition of "stable": software that doesn't need changing for multiple years. The Debian term "stable" has nothing to do with whether or not a program crashes regularly, but how often it requires maintenance. In that definition, "evolving" software indeed isn't "stable" (yet).