Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On 20041022T134825+0200, Jérôme Marant wrote: >> Before "testing", the RM used to freeze unstable and people were >> working on fixing bugs. There were pretest cycles with bug horizons, >> and freezes were shorter. > > That's not true (unless you are talking about something that was ceased > several years before testing became live, certainly before I started > following Debian development in 1998). Before testing the RM used to > fork unstable into a "frozen" distribution. Unstable was still open for > development, and heated arguments developed on this very list asking > that the process be changed so that unstable would be frozen; this was > never done. > > I don't know what you mean by "pretest cycles with bug horizons". >
You are correct. It seems so old to me that I didn't even recall it was a fork. This indeed explains why that process had to be improved. It also explains why the current process needs to be improved as well. Thanks to Ubuntu, we now have a good example of what's proven to work. > The current freeze has been quite short - if one ignores the current > delay by the missing testing security support - and pre-testing freezes > were not that much shorter (unless, again, one looks at ancient history. > when Debian was a lot smaller). I was refering to the woody freeze. >> Instead of always telling than a given idea won't work, let's >> try it and conclude afterwards. > > The problem is that on this scale trying such things out is costly and > time-consuming. Arguably were are still in the process of trying > "testing". I didn't says "let's try it right now", and certainly not while trying to release Sarge. -- Jérôme Marant http://marant.org
