Re: Bits from the Release Team - Kicking off Wheezy
On 02/05/11 at 16:19 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Lucas Nussbaum <lucas@lucas-nussbaum.net> writes:
>
> > [ Note that my position is based on the assumption that we have a share
> > of DDs interested in rolling similar to the share of DDs interested in
> > stable releases. Unfortunately, it's very difficult to know where we
> > stand regarding this. ]
>
> I'm very dubious. To take one example, if Debian stopped making stable
> releases, it would no longer be usable at work, which would mean that my
> ability to work in Debian would substantially decrease and quite possibly
> go away completely.
Except for the sake of argumentation, I don't think that anybody
considers seriously that Debian would stop making stable releases.
The question is whether we want to provide a rolling release in addition
to our stable releases.
> I realize that we're often not on the mailing lists jumping up and down
> and advocating for our issues, in part because Debian works great for us
> and not much needs to be changed, but please remember that there are a
> *lot* of us using Debian on servers in large-scale production
> environments. And stable is our world. It's EXTREMELY IMPORTANT. It is,
> in many cases, the reason why we were able to sell Debian in the first
> place; if it weren't for Debian's exceptionally good stable releases, we
> would probably all be running Red Hat.
>
> I went on about this at some length at the last DebConf as part of the
> enterprise track.
I assume that when you write 'us' or 'we' here, you mean 'Debian users
in large-scale production environments'. Again, I'm not diminishing the
importance of stable releases. But I've always found it strange that, as
a volunteer project, we are creating a product that is mainly used in
professional environments.
I think that the key information missing in this thread is simply:
| Do DDs want to consider the possibility to create a 'rolling release'
| product?
It is clear from the discussion that there would be consequences. Some
would be negative, some positive. I think that we have now a pretty good
understanding of the possibilities and their consequences. The remaining
problem is to count DDs heads in the two camps:
- "Let's focus on stable releases. A rolling release should not be
provided officially by Debian."
- "Let's see what we can do about rolling, provided we find a way to do it
without diminishing the quality of our stable releases."
- Lucas
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