Gustavo Franco wrote: > * testing metric is too simple, packages are allowed to enter testing > only after a certain period of time has passed no matter if much > people tested it before that and just when they don't have > release-critical bugs filed against them. Of course we have a team of RMs who are able override that and apply as complex a metric as you'd like on a special-case basis. As well as urgency=high in the changelog. The tendency of dependency chains can block transitions, and keep RC bugs open unduely long in testing is a much worse problem with speed of testing migration. Testing also needs periodic snapshots and guaranteed upgradability to be useable by more users, amoung other points I discuss at http://kitenet.net/~joey/code/debian/cut/ > * developers and most active contributors are pretty much using only > stable or unstable and not testing. What's your data? A fun though not entirely reliable data source is the "APT prefers" lines inserted by reportbug in bug reports. A quick grep[1] of the BTS gives: 51988 APT prefers unstable 30351 APT prefers testing 2076 APT prefers stable 420 APT prefers experimental 373 APT prefers testing-proposed-updates 220 APT prefers oldstable 190 APT prefers proposed-updates 60 APT prefers dapper-updates 50 APT prefers dapper 30 APT prefers breezy-updates 24 APT prefers edgy-updates 17 APT prefers breezy 16 APT prefers feisty-updates 13 APT prefers edgy 10 APT prefers hoary-updates 10 APT prefers feisty 10 APT prefers breezy-security 7 APT prefers sarge 7 APT prefers etch 7 APT prefers dapper-security (For bonus fun, someone could graph how these change over time..) > 1) The 'remove experimental' proposal > > * Warn developers and contributors[0] > * Remove experimental > * Switch unstable (release) for not automatic updates > > [0] = This warning should contain the hint for contributors switch from > unstable to testing and those who want to pick unstable stuff do like > we do today with experimental. > > The benefit of the approach above from a RM point of view is that we will > have more eyeballs over testing and it doesn't mean that we will have less > people using unstable pieces. This assumes that experimental is used by a lot of people, which I doubt, especially given the default apt pins and the numbers above. Experimental is already only rarely uploaded to -- 1 in 20 packages have a version in experimental (some of them outdated). I've seen plenty of cases of developers complaining that they uploaded to experimental and got too little additional testing from doing so. Moving the line between experimental and unstable might drive some people to testing, but I don't feel it will be many, especially as many developers upload even risky changes to unstable already. If you want more users to use testing, see CUT. If you want more developers to use testing, I firstly don't entirely see the point, but providing better tools for developers to develop for unstable while using testing might help. > 2) The 'remove testing' proposal Amoung many other problems this postpones most work on the installer until the release it will install is frozen. -- see shy jo [1] joeyh@merkel:/org/bugs.debian.org/spool/db-h>find -name \*.log | xargs grep 'APT prefers' | uniq | sed -e 's/.*: *//' -e 's/ *$//' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn
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