My take on the situation is that there are two reasons for why the freeze takes a long time. The first is just fixing the release critical bugs -- this commonly receives a lot of attention from this list. The second is coordination between all the elements which are required for release (boot-floppies, cd, archive mgmt, porters, the QA team, testers, security team).
* Release Critical Bugs With respect to fixing release critical bugs, I think there are two components to lowering this as a big problem. The first, as pointed out, is to *not* try to cram heavily broken things into unstable just prior to freeze, and it just requires a little self-discipline from developers. The second solution for fixing release-critical bugs is a revived and healthy Debian QA group. I believe Joey is trying to revive this, and I wish him the best of luck. Looking back at the slink freeze, I think we had two big problems which slowed us down by about a month: new X Window System packages, heavily broken, and the libc problems. I don't wish to cast any blame on the package managers for this -- I just hope we don't have a repeat, and I hope everyone learned a lesson from that. * Release Coordination As we add more and more ports, the issue of release coordination becomes more difficult. There is very complex interactions between the particular state of the Debian frozen archive, the boot-floppies, the CD images, ports, etc. For instance, a fix for a certain problem in i386 might really make life hell for the ports. No forum currently now for the discussion of the actual freeze area itself, what problems must be fixed for proper implementation/testing of boot-floppies or CDs, conflicts between the frozen archive for different architectures (these really suck), which architectures are release candidates, etc. I propose that we create a new list (argh, yet another list!), 'debian-release'. Next, we ask that representatives from all interested teams (including boot-floppies, cd, archive mgmt, porters, the QA team, testers, security team) be subscribed to the list. This would be a low-volume list for the increased communication between these teams. The consensus reached on this list must be implemented in an prompt fashion, i.e., moving packages into the archive. Looking back at the slink release, I think we went into the freeze with no proven facility to deal with multiple CDs, and this cause significant delays. Numerous conflicts between the ports arose. I also think that porters, boot-floppies members, and the CD team felt a bit helpless in having a say about what needed to go into the frozen archive. Comments? -- .....Adam Di [EMAIL PROTECTED]<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>
