Re: Bits from the Release Team - Kicking off Wheezy

[Ludovico Cavedon <cavedon@debian.org>]

On 04/30/2011 04:32 PM, Pierre Habouzit wrote:
> FWIW I think that "rolling" or "CUT" miss the point entirely. As a
> Debian user I use stable on my servers (with a few backports for the 3-4
> things I need bleeding edge for). For my desktop I use unstable, and
> when that breaks (which is *very* rare, really) I go to snapshots and go
> back a few versions. I couldn't care about testing any less. And at
> work, every person I know either uses just stable or does the same as
> me. I know no testing user around me. Of course I'm not pretending I
> know the absolute Truth, but well, I find this whole "users want testing
> badly" thing dubious.

I do know people who run testing.
Actually I can see two kinds of users who run testing.
-people who want to keep getting software updates, but do not want to
run unstable [1]. They would point to "testing" in their apt
sources.list. These are the users who want "rolling"
-people who would decided to run the next stable release, before it is
actually released, they would point their sources.list to "wheezy" (as
of now). there are the users who will go though "rolling", then
"frozen", then "stable"

[1] I run unstable in my laptop, and it is stable enough for me, but for
a regular user I can see how these 10 days between unstable and testing
can help her to avoid getting in contact with major bugs/issues.

Even though I do not have numbers, I can see both use cases for rolling
and frozen. Ok, frozen might get less users than testing during freeze,
but handling both these 2 use cases could actually attract more users.

Form what I could understand, the main purpose of "rolling" is to avoid
the discontinuity in updates flow that happens in unstable (and of
course in testing), when testing is under freeze. Which is annoying for
users who do not care about stable. Such users (first type above) will
have to go and pick updates from experimental during freeze (with all
the problems Pierre mentioned about experimental).
Similar reasoning applies to developers: those who care about having the
latest version in unstable, will switch to uploading to experimental
rather than unstable.
So I am not sure that arguments like "having testing frozen and avoiding
major updates in unstable help DD and users focus on preparing the next
stable" actually apply...

>   - get rid of experimental that would mostly become useless as PPA
>     would clearly be a superset of the features.

I completely agree on this, sounds like a really good idea.

My 2 cents,
Cheers,
Ludovico