Jérôme Marant wrote:
> It's too bad that interesting discussions take place in blogs rather
> than in Debian mailing lists, especially for those who don't blog
> but would like to participate.
Logbooks are suited for a lot, but not for discussions. They're more
suited for experiences, statements and the like.
I'm thankful you're taking the discussion to this list, where probably
more people will be able participate as well.
> Scott James Remnant said something interesting about Ubuntu release
> management: Ubuntu people run the distribution that gets released,
> and the distribution is frozen until it's ready.
>
> Debian developers, on the contrary, run unstable and rarely run
> testing, which means that they don't really know about the shape
> of what they release.
Since testing is what unstable was (and many packages are the same in
both sid and sarge), this is often not the case when you look at
individual packages or groups of packages.
However, it is true that the developers often run the bleeding edge
suite since that's the development target most of the time.
> The Testing distribution helped a lot in release management,
> especially for synchronizing architectures.
Despite some problems that weren't dealt with (missing dependencies,
missing/unfulfilled source depenendencies) testing worked pretty well.
> Some improvements have already been proposed by Eduard Bloch and
> Adrian Bunk: freezing unstable while keeping testing.
It may pose a problem that development in unstable usually continues
while testing is frozen and only important bugs should be fixed.
However, if unstable would be frozen at the same time, would
development stop? Probably not. I'm pretty sure that several would
start with separate repositories and the like to make more recent
versions of the software available which they maintain.
We must not forget the focus on fixing the frozen distribution and
making it ready, though.
> Freezing unstable forces people to work on fixing bugs, and the
> quicker the bugs are fixed, the quicker the distribution is
> released and the quicker Debian people can start working on
> on the next release.
Freezeing unstable forces people not to do development in unstable.
It won't force people to fix bugs and the like. Closing a motorway
won't stop people from driving (too) fast, it would stop people from
using the motorway for driving (too) fast instead.
Regards,
Joey
--
Reading is a lost art nowadays. -- Michael Weber
Please always Cc to me when replying to me on the lists.
