Re: More 5 november in the release schedule
On Sun, 6 Nov 2016 12:53:42 +0100, Christian Seiler
<christian@iwakd.de> wrote:
>And if the problem is complicated, they have other
>options: request for help on debian-devel@ and debian-mentors@,
>request an exception from the release team to mark a bug as
>stretch-ignore in specific cases, request an extension by the
>release team to delay autoremoval so they have more time to
>fix the issue, etc.
This means that one needs personal sympathy, a thing that many people
don't have. Especially those who have spoken their mind in the past or
have voiced a minority opinion are likely to experience that. I have
always liked in Debian that you don't need to brown-nose the people in
power to have your work appreciated. Sadly, those times seem to be
over.
>If a stable release is going to happen, there needs to be some
>kind of process so that one may converge on a stable result.
I have been around since Debian slink. I have seen train-wreck
releases like sarge. As being around for so long, I have to say that
the last three-or-so releases have been rather smooth and painless,
thanks to the good work the release team and the rest of the Debian
community have done.
Even the systemd migration, which I have predicted as being doomed and
quite painful, went without a hitch. I must say that I have been
really astonished about this and I am proud of being a (tiny and
mostly irrelevant) part of the community that has done so superb work
in the last years. systemd has made us lose valuable people, but we
got even this release out of the door nearly in time and in a
nearly-perfect stage. Well done.
Actually, I am kind of afraid that after we have driven off the people
who complained about us releasing too seldomly with the pre-lenny
releases, we are now driving off the people who complain about us
releasing too often. This effect will be enhanced by the fact that
we're going to release an incomplete stretch this time, with no
mechanism in place that will even tell pre-existing users of a package
that was in jessie but not in stretch that we felt like removing this
package.
That being said, I simply don't see the neccisity of tightening the
thumbscrews on contributors with the new policy. We have done
sufficiently well in the past, and this new policy is not going to
improve this, but au contraire.
>What happens if you only have a single deadline to freeze
>fully? Immediately before that deadline people panic because
>they noticed they didn't take care of their packages enough
>and upload tons of stuff on very short notice - which leads to
>more bugs due to weird interactions that will then have to be
>sorted out during the actual freeze. With the soft deadlines
>added now, this will be relaxed quite a bit, because
>everything doesn't hit at once, but it's spaced out and the
>overall quality will improve.
Agreed.
>I really don't see where you are coming from: why do you think
>this makes things worse?
We will release an incomplete distribution if we don't allow packages
back in. And it will damage our contributor's egos when they get the
information that their package is not important enough to get an
exception, while more important or key packages will _OF_ _COURSE_ be
excempt from this policy. We already have a two-class citizenship in
Debian, this policy is going to introduce a third class.
>The only people affected negatively
>by this are going to be people asleep at the wheel for the
>entire Stretch cycle that only wake up right before the hard
>freeze. And I think that curbing that kind of maintenance
>"style" is a very, very good thing.
I'd rather have a badly maintained package than none.
Greetings
Marc
--
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Marc Haber | " Questions are the | Mailadresse im Header
Mannheim, Germany | Beginning of Wisdom " | http://www.zugschlus.de/
Nordisch by Nature | Lt. Worf, TNG "Rightful Heir" | Fon: *49 621 72739834
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