Re: Bits from the Release Team - Kicking off Wheezy
Hi
On Sunday 01 May 2011, Philipp Kern wrote:
> On 2011-05-01, Stefano Zacchiroli <zack@debian.org> wrote:
> > - I've talked at several trade shows and conferences with developers of
> > rolling distros based on Debian (in particular: Aptosid/Sidux and
> > Linux Mint Debian Edition). They usually claim they have built those
> > distros because Debian wasn't offering such feature (yes, they should
> > have probably tried do that in Debian, NIH syndrome exists, yada yada,
> > not to mention the fact they might have said that to me because they
> > wanted to be kind towards Debian). It must have been half a dozen
> > people.
>
> Maybe you could outline what they add to Debian to make it more useful.
> I know that Sidux used to provide a kernel and stopgap solutions to bad
> bugs in unstable where the maintainers needed more time or looked for
> more sane solutions. But that's more from casual searching, so maybe we
> could clear that up first?
[...]
This perception is correct, we directly use Debian unstable/main[1] and
only augment it with custom packages[2] (live framework, kernel, some
configuration helpers, artwork) and (try to) provide hotfixes for
serious (long(er) term issues). We don't provide updated packages for
newer upstream versions just because they are available or would be
nice to have; retaining an untainted upgrade path is a core priority.
Of course, times of (long) freeze aren't particularly nice, both from a
user's ("boring" package versions) and developer's (getting detached
from upstream development (experimental is not really useful, as it lacks
any form of integration efforts - which directly results in difficult
unfreezing situations, due to lots of accumulated changes happening at
once and often with little coordination)) points of view.
Regards
Stefan Lippers-Hollmann (aptosid developer)
[1] releases are snapshots of the repository state (Debian and our own)
of the release date, installed systems track unstable directly[2].
[2] http://aptosid.com/files/misc/sources.list.d/
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