Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
On 2009-07-29, Frans Pop <elendil@planet.nl> wrote:
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> On Wednesday 29 July 2009, Meike Reichle wrote:
>> The Debian project has decided to adopt a new policy of time-based
>> development freezes for future releases, on a two-year cycle.
>
> Disappointing to see such an announcement without any prior discussion on=20
I'm disappointed by the decision, the timing and the process.
I'm especially dissapointed about the "we freeze after less than a year
of open unstable".
The process:
This is not something that should be done only by the release team
without a broad discussion amongst the developers, unless the relaese
team wants to do it them selves without cooperation from the package
maintainers.
The timing:
If we are going to do a yearly release, we need to announce it to the
developers more than 5 months before freeze. Too many people have too
many plans.
We also need to coordinate such things with the larger packaging teams
to see wether it fits their schedules and their upstream schedules. For
example from a KDE point of view, it is around teh worst time.
...and we still have the same kernel and X in testing as in stable.
The decision:
Why doing a 12 months release "to get into the new schedule" instead of
just adopting a 24 months schedule based on the lenny release? [1]
By freezing after around 9 months after thawing, we will again annoy the
many sid users we have, and by doing releases after 12 months after a
release, we will start annoy the "corporate" users.
By freezing after around 9 months of unstable we annoy the developers
who wants to get stuff done before a release.
And what happened to "when it is ready" ?
If a freeze is expected to be short, the release team needs help from
the package maintainers. This is not the way to get the package
maintainers to help them.
I'm considering how we can get this decision undone. Anyone up for
helping with that?
/Sune
[1] Some people says it is to get to work better with ubuntu in security
things and other such "stable support" - and having the same package
versions will make it easier to share patches. Unfortunately, in some
cases this will not fit. For example, Qt4.6 and KDE4.4 is expected to be
released in january, which would be right after the debian freeze. I
would be very surprised to see a ubuntu releaese in april with kde4.3
and qt4.5. And here, we now already have two browser engines that we
can't work properly together and share patches with ubuntu, because too
much has (probably) happened.
And for much other software, there is probably similar examples.
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