> It may sound a bit radical, but core points have been mentioned in the > thread already. I suggest to do it in a more radical way: > > - unstable lockdown in the freeze > - drop Testing and concentrate on work instead of wasting time on > synching stuff. This eliminates the need for testing-security. See > the last part of the paper for details.
Doing this would result in many users who currently run testing fall back to stable + backports or switch to another distro (ubuntu being a likely candidate), which in turn, would result in less bugreports and a less stable distribution. I, for one, wouldn't run unstable on my parents' box, whereas testing proved to be quite reliable there. Freezing unstable will get you nothing compared to what we have now. Those who don't care about a release, will not care that way either, just their complaints will get louder and more frequent. Those who are willing to do the work neccessary for the release are already trying to. Remember, Debian is a volunteer project, you cannot force people to do something they do not want to. > - about the "filtering updates for frozen" - yes, some additional > manpower is required but that work must be done. The problems with > Testing synchronisation are not of pure technical nature, they are > social problem, and so they should be solved by people and not > scripts. Yes, testing synchronisation is not a purely technical matter. Nor is it purely social, so the testing scripts, which automatically keep stuff in sync, are a real help. On top of that, package maintainers coordinating with each other (the social part) is welcomed too, and should be encouraged. (And those who break a transition should be kicked in the ass, so they won't try it again :P) I firmly believe that fixing the problems with testing (mainly testing-security at this point in time) would be MUCH better than dropping testing and freezing unstable before the next release. -- Gergely Nagy
