On Sun, Oct 24, 2004 at 08:44:47PM +0200, Gergely Nagy wrote:
<very big snip>
>
> Getting people motivated should not be done in a way that makes - I hope
> - many of them unhappy. To get back to your point - blocking uploads to
> unstable will not make more people concentrate on the release. They'll
> surely find something else that "more fun": it's not "release or
> uploads", it's "release or uploads or something else". Those who do not
> give a damn about the release, will not change their mind when unstable
> is frozen.
>
> Motivating people means getting them interested in the release, making
> the process "more fun" for them. Or at least less of a nuiseance.
> Freezing unstable will add to the annoyance level, instead of taking
> away from it.
<small snip>
>
> What you propose places even more burden on the release managers, even
> more stuff to deal with. They will not get motivated by this, not at
> all. Ways to make the current system better - THAT would be very
> welcome. Like enhancing the logic of the testing scripts, which decide
> when and how a package migrates from unstable to testing, so migrations
> could get faster and large blocking stuff could be eliminated, that
> would help the release. Placing burden on people who already have more
> than enough to care and worry about won't help at all, methinks.
>
<small snip>
> So far, the main complaint against testing is that sometimes packages
> get stuck. *Duh*, so fix the problem that made them stuck. That might
> need some social engineereing, as most of the time, stuckage is not
> caused by technical problems. Would you want to push the same larger
> update into a frozen unstable, you'd run into the very same problems
> anyway.
>
All of the above makes a very great deal of sense. I've been around
Debian as a lurker since 1.2 and an active user since 1.3. Testing
has solved lots of problems. Stable is _always_ too old after about two
months after release - though point releases do help when they are
allowed to be made. Unstable is generally just a fraction too dynamic:
I run unstable on my machines at home because I can fix it - and because
it's not mission-critical here - but I run testing at work because it's
had the bugs gradually hammered out of it. I'm _hoping_ that testing will
get released Real Soon Now so that I can reassure the authorities at
work that the software is stable - it's only a name but a world of
difference and it means I can pass control of one machine to the end
users {B-) Most users in the Linux User Group that I'm part of
have aaparently also gradually moved to Debian testing - it works for
them and various of them have adopted it as they have seen others succeed.
As far as _I'm_ concerned, testing is ready to release as Stable now, modulo
one or two annoying bugs in the Sparc debian-installer. On i386 installer
works fine, on Alpha it's OK. The installer is pretty much hammered to death
for all architectures. Testing proposed updates is in place. If we
just chucked the release out of the door tomorrow as Stable, we'd probably be
at least as ready as we were for hamm/potato/woody IMHO. This is not
insuperable. Debian advocacy is taking up quite a lot of my time at
work, to my boss's annoyance, as I point out that the commercial
distributions don't have the software we need and use :) Dropping
testing altogether seems at first sight to be an easy option and testing
seems to be an easy target - but it benefits us much more than it hurts.
Now, fresh from flamewars, Ubuntu bashing and threats of GR's - how
close are we to release and can we just f* well do it please??
Andy
