Julian Gilbey wrote: > Santiago Vila wrote: > > There is no "current practice" yet, really. > > I propose two different ways to do the freeze: > > > > 1. Create frozen between testing and unstable, > > initially as a copy of testing. > > 2. Create frozen between testing and unstable, > > initially as a copy of unstable. > > Surely 2 defeats the whole purpose of testing?
Not at all. The idea is that whatever you uploaded for unstable before day D of the freeze will be part of Debian 2.3 unless it *actually* has serious bugs, as we *wanted* to do before testing existed, but without the risks testing eliminates. I think testing is compatible with a freeze. If we do not have a proper freeze, developers could upload something which is bug-free to testing and it still may end up not being part of Debian 2.3 because there was no time to recompile it for other archs or there were complex dependency chains which were not satisfied at release time. This may create a lot of frustration among developers. Please note that this proposal means that testing and frozen will progressively become more and more similar as packages in frozen which are recompiled are being moved to testing. A freeze would also have benefits for autobuilders, since they could concentrate their efforts in the frozen packages only.