On Sat, 30 May 1998, Bdale Garbee wrote:
> I had an interesting chat with one of my cohorts at work today about
> this topic. We spent some time thinking about the various Debian
> users we know, and tried to characterize what they want from the
> distribution. What we came up with was the notion that it splits
> three ways.
> [...deleted...]
Wow!
an excellent post. couldn't agree with it more.
(btw, this sort of thing is one the things i envisioned being done by
the 'marketing & market research' team i suggested).
> We think the third group represents the primary target market for a
> distribution like Debian. This group has good net access, wants to
> stay reasonably current, but can't tolerate dealing with the worst 10%
> or so of the package churn that happens in a bleeding-edge "unstable"
> tree. They would prefer not to bump into any real problems, but
> they're willing to stumble once in a while if that's the price of
> keeping up with security patches, new development tool releases,
> and the like. This group might be characterized by those who are
> currently running 'hamm' on production servers, as we do at work.
these are the people who would really benefit from having monthly or
bi-monthly snapshot cd-roms.
i think that some, but not all, would have good net access. if they
all had net access then the number of people in group 1 would be much
higher as their desires are closer to group 1 than group 2. So regular
snapshot CDs are very important for these people.
> [...deleted...] but also to build a "stable but unreleased" tree for
> this third group. The key concept is that if a package version has
> been released for some period of time (a week, a month, not sure how
> long makes sense) without being retracted or superceded, then it is,
> by definition, "stable"... even though it's absolute quality is still
> an unknown.
yes, this is a great idea too. and as you say, quite easy to automate.
> So, group one wants nothing between them and the developer's uploads,
> group two wants a human testing team to have reviewed and approved
> each package that is on their CD, and group three doesn't want to wait
> for a human testing team, but wants to distance themselves a touch
> from the bleeding edge.
so:
group 1 - usually upgrades via ftp or from a nfs-mounted local mirror.
probably a debian developer.
group 2 - upgrades from a CD release which has been through the
unstable -> frozen -> stable testing cycle.
group 3 - upgrades from monthly snapshot CD, and occasional via ftp for
some urgent fix.
this is just a 'me too' post in disguise. what you wrote says it all,
really.
craig
--
craig sanders
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