Re: bits from the release team
On Tue, Jan 03, 2006 at 06:26:02PM -0300, Margarita Manterola wrote:
> On 1/3/06, Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr> wrote:
>
> > Why do you put the kernel together with the essential toolchain freeze, it
> > should be together with the rest of base, i believe.
> > [...]
> > We will have a kernel which is outdated by two versions at release time with
> > this plan, since there are about 1 kernel upstream release every 2 month.
> >
> > So, we will be asking the question about the upgradability of the kernel later
> > during this release process, and i believe that it is not something which
> > should be ignored. Already you are considering upgrading the sarge kernel
> > which has some trouble booting on a rather non-negligible quantity of
> > hardware, so having a two version outdated kernel at release time is not nice.
>
> I really don't think that having a four months out-dated kernel is
> that bad. What is really important is to have stable kernels. Past
> experience with the modified 2.6 release policy has shown that some
> 2.6 kernels are pretty stable and some others are quite crappy.
Indeed, but that would be something the kernel team is best placed to decide,
and if a given unstable kernel is crappy, we won't allow it in testing, its
that simple.
> So, I'd say it's better to give some time to be sure that the kernel
> that is shipping with Debian's stable distribution is really a stable
> kernel, and not a crappy one. I don't think you can tell the
> difference before this version of the kernel reaches a big number of
> people, and therefore, it does need time (frozen, in testing).
Indeed, unstable is such a place, but is 4 month too much of a time to find
out, and would a month or two be enough, i do believe this.
> However, if while preparing the release, the frozen kernel would show
> up as being a crappy one, the release managers might allow for a new
> kernel to enter testing. But this is only a hypothetical case, and I
> expect it would be carefully evaluated before it actually happened.
The crappy kernel would never enter testing in the first place, as testing has
always been done on unstable. See 2.6.14 is out for over 2 month now, and it
didn't reach testing, and never will now that 2.6.15 is out, because the
devfs/initrd-tool situation, and this was the right thing to do.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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