Ludovico Cavedon <cave...@debian.org> wrote: >On 04/30/2011 04:32 PM, Pierre Habouzit wrote: >> FWIW I think that "rolling" or "CUT" miss the point entirely. As a >> Debian user I use stable on my servers (with a few backports for the >3-4 >> things I need bleeding edge for). For my desktop I use unstable, and >> when that breaks (which is *very* rare, really) I go to snapshots and >go >> back a few versions. I couldn't care about testing any less. And at >> work, every person I know either uses just stable or does the same as >> me. I know no testing user around me. Of course I'm not pretending I >> know the absolute Truth, but well, I find this whole "users want >testing >> badly" thing dubious. > >I do know people who run testing. >Actually I can see two kinds of users who run testing. >-people who want to keep getting software updates, but do not want to >run unstable [1]. They would point to "testing" in their apt >sources.list. These are the users who want "rolling" >-people who would decided to run the next stable release, before it is >actually released, they would point their sources.list to "wheezy" (as >of now). there are the users who will go though "rolling", then >"frozen", then "stable" > >[1] I run unstable in my laptop, and it is stable enough for me, but >for >a regular user I can see how these 10 days between unstable and testing >can help her to avoid getting in contact with major bugs/issues. > >Even though I do not have numbers, I can see both use cases for rolling >and frozen. Ok, frozen might get less users than testing during freeze, >but handling both these 2 use cases could actually attract more users. > >Form what I could understand, the main purpose of "rolling" is to avoid >the discontinuity in updates flow that happens in unstable (and of >course in testing), when testing is under freeze. Which is annoying for >users who do not care about stable. Such users (first type above) will >have to go and pick updates from experimental during freeze (with all >the problems Pierre mentioned about experimental). >Similar reasoning applies to developers: those who care about having >the >latest version in unstable, will switch to uploading to experimental >rather than unstable. >So I am not sure that arguments like "having testing frozen and >avoiding >major updates in unstable help DD and users focus on preparing the next >stable" actually apply...
I think that such a solution would, at best, be a half solution to the problem you describe. Even when Testing is not frozen, interlocking transitions often delay availability of new releases. Sometimes this is due to an entanglement delaying a transition and sometimes it's due to needing to wait for a transition slot. Unless this problem is solved too, I doubt rolling will roll nearly as much as people will want or accept. Scott K -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/e7e4fe9d-8b6e-4566-8545-38e11c384...@email.android.com
