Re: Building tier-2 against testing (was: Re: Bits (Nybbles?) from the Vancouver release team meeting)
On Tue, Mar 15, 2005 at 11:18:54AM +0100, David Schmitt wrote:
> On Tuesday 15 March 2005 10:41, Sven Luther wrote:
> > Could you be more clear about this ? which issues are those ?
>
> Sven, Steve is referring to the first part of his mail, where he says that
> building from testing will lose "any of the controls testing is supposed to
> provide to protect against uninstallable packages".
Ah, ok, then i think i have replied to this already.
> > And how do
> > you make sure those arches have a stable base to do their daily work on ?
>
> More stable than unstable? As stable as testing? Please explain this to me, I
> am little slow in the morning.
You know that following unstable, especially for not mainstream arches, mean
random breakage-of-the-day, and such, right ? Also it means that you don't get
the protection against RC bugs and such, which would affect the stability of
your main work plateforms, and make clean installations from scratch often
impossible for large amount of time.
> > And if testing is not appropriate for them, why don't we drop testing
> > altogether ?
>
> Off the top of my head I would say because testing was appropriate for a small
> number of arches but didn't appropriately scale for a bigger number of arches
> where the probability of breakage on any single one of them approaches one.
Yes, but the thing is that the two-distribution approach, one for uploading
packages, the other for having a base for proven-good packages is useful and
even needed. This is currently denied the arch porters.
Furthermore the fact to have a testing which follows and mirrors the tier-1
testing is vital to allow for stable point releases. rejecting tier-2 testing
support based on tier-1 testing kills in the egg any chance of a stable point
release later on.
> Also testing is absolutely needed to be able to properly support stable after
> the release: this needs synced arches, else security updates would need to
> recompile several different minor diverging versions each time.
No i don't think this holds. Once stable is released, it is totally divorced
from testing, and only gets interaction through stable-proposed-updates.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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