Sarge+1: ideas for Experimental V1.2 (or is that 0.2?)
Hello,
I'm glad to hear so many people agreeing with the RM's plans and even
more glad to see so many things being done to make this seem plausible!
I'm one of those developers who has cvs and other unrealeasable packages
in sid. I agree with the comments about moving these to experimental,
keeping sid for just releases considered stable, but think changes need
to be made to experimental so that people do this by default and so sid
will be even more stable:
Split experimental into sections:
- I don't like having an experimental base system, but would like to try
out the latest gnome desktop.
experimental-core - new major upstream releases of core packages
experimental-gnome - gnome 2.3, galeon2.3, epiphany...
experimental-kde
experimental-gnome-woody - backport of gnome2 to woody
experimental-all - includes all of the above (well, almost)
...
sid - candidates for future Debian stable. All considered stable
releases upstream.
Ideally, creating new sections should be as simple as sending a message
to the ftp-masters.
'Full' Distributions
Each section should be have full Packages and Release files including
packages from sid and that experimental section. Hopefully this would
encourage more people to use experimental all the time. Having more
people use experimental would make developers more willing to upload
things to experimental.
BTS Support for tracking when bugs were changed
- AFAIK, already been worked on
This will be more important when there are a large number of
users/testers using different distributions - sid and experimental.
Automatic builds
- I want galeon to be built on all architectures automatically.
Having a simple email interface would be nice, but automatic for every
upload would be better. The changes I'm proposing here would move
packages from sid to experimental - they are automatically built
for sid already, so this won't incurr much build time.
We would need more disk space than currently used - e.g. so that the
exp.-gnome section could be built in a chroot with sid and exp.-gnome;
exp-.gnome-woody could be built with woody and exp-gnome-woody.
Obviously it would require some more processor time, but IMHO
this is well worth it.
If buildd machines are falling behind, why don't we spend some of the
money Debian has? Is there any real data as to which buildds are
struggling?
One other useful idea to reduce load would be to have some option on the
buildds for don't attempt a rebuild (of any version) until bug x has
been fixed.
In summary, changes like these would mean:
- more people use experimental
- sid has fewer experimental packages
+ it is broken less often (perhaps the 'unstable' name should be
changed?)
+ testing is kept recent more often
- It would make it possible to have official support for things like
gnome backports
- It may make it easier to experiment with things like having separate
server and desktop releases. (In terms of applying the separate
sections idea to the whole of Debian)
Does anybody have any additions for thses ideas, or any ideas for other
changes to aid sarge+1 development?
--
.''`. Mark Howard
: :' :
`. `' http://www.tildemh.com
`- mh@debian.org | mh@tildemh.com | mh344@cam.ac.uk
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