Re: [hertzog@debian.org: Re: Woody retrospective and Sarge introspective]
Le Tue, Jul 30, 2002 at 04:46:11PM -0400, Joey Hess écrivait:
> > Because you think that the introduction of testing simplified the work
> > of maintainers ? Look the pain that it is to follow update-excuses to
> > see why your package is not entering testing.
>
> Yes exactly -- not imagine the pain of having to track which are in
> yet another distribution, and why not.
Well, candidate is not difficult to manage. Either you have uploaded a
package there or you haven't. Since it is not automatically fed it's
easy to know where you are.
> I don't think it offers much if anything over special-purpose staging
> areas as is being used for perl 5.8 right now.
Staging area are used by a very limited set of user. Software doesn't
really "mature" (in the sense of "getting ready for a Debian release")
until it reaches unstable. Once it is unstable, it slowly progresses
over the month and after a few month, they are releasable.
But during all the time, testing is not releasable because it is based
on software that is not ready. Having a separate candidate distribution
would eliminate that problem.
That's what aj is aiming for, having a distribution that is always
almost ready to release. This is not doable with testing because it's
always fed by updated packages with new code. the 15 days delay is
certainly not enough because it tracks only critical problems but the
software still needs 3 monthes until it is ready for an end-user (think
of a debconf interface ... a bug explaining that questions are badly
worded and so on will certainly be of priority "normal" and as such the
package would enter testing anyway, even if it's not really ready from
prime time).
Do you see better my point ?
Do you see other solutions to go away with the current problems that I
describe ?
> I think we're still waiting on it because it does not work on all
> architectures.
Sure, but if it were in unstable, autobuilders (and porters) would have
tried to compile it, they'd have noticed the failure sooner and would
have helped Branden to fix that situation because they don't want to
lag behind i386. Now, only people who are part of the X Strike Force are
testing/helping.
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog -+- http://strasbourg.linuxfr.org/~raphael/
Formation Linux et logiciel libre : http://www.logidee.com
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