Re: Dropping testing (was: Re: Bits (Nybbles?) from the Vancouver release team meeting)

[Adrian Bunk <bunk@stusta.de>]

On Thu, Mar 17, 2005 at 12:29:28AM +0000, Darren Salt wrote:
> I demand that Adrian Bunk may or may not have written...
> 
> [snip]
> > And without testing, all these transition problems wouldn't exist.
> 
> And without testing, there are those who currently use testing who'd use
> stable instead, or possibly go elsewhere.
> 
> (I'm currently using testing. Updating an installation from unstable over a
> dial-up connection isn't /quite/ what I want...)


Even if you are using unstable, noone forces you to update all packages 
on a daily basis.


The main reason of people I know who are currently using testing is 
simply that Debian stable is much too outdated for being useful.

I do believe that it was still possible to release a new stable Debian 
once a year [1] - and that this was still possible using a "traditional 
freeze" without testing.


For making testing really usable, security support would be required.

This requires manpower (that might perhaps be available).

And it requires something else:
The testing scripts would have to handle build dependencies as if they 
were dependencies.

This shouldn't be too hard to implement, but my impression is, that the 
sole reason why it isn't implemented until now is, that it would 
increase the amount of manual work required by both the release team and 
all Debian developers even more.


And this leaves still the question whether it's worth sacrificing eight 
architectures.


cu
Adrian

[1] no, I'm not talking about point releases

-- 

       "Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
        of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
       "Only a promise," Lao Er said.
                                       Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed