Re: Bits from the Release Team - Kicking off Wheezy
Ludovico Cavedon <cavedon@debian.org> wrote:
>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...
I think that such a solution would, at best, be a half solution to the problem you describe. Even when Testing is not frozen, interlocking transitions often delay availability of new releases. Sometimes this is due to an entanglement delaying a transition and sometimes it's due to needing to wait for a transition slot.
Unless this problem is solved too, I doubt rolling will roll nearly as much as people will want or accept.
Scott K
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