On Wednesday 18 April 2007 16:38, Simon Huggins wrote: > There are always things that miss a release but had the freeze been > pushed back to February say (two months before the release as per the > original Oct -> Dec intention) then the January release of 4.4.0 may > well have been deemed stable enough to ship. Who knows. OTOH, if the freeze had been pushed back, there would undoubtedly have been new uploads or packages accepted into testing that would have had serious issues and would have caused additional delays. From what I have seen during both the Sarge and Etch releases, a lot of developers simply don't care about stabilization and upgrade paths, or at least not enough to do some dedicated testing. Having said that, there was one significant unforeseen factor that delayed the release of Etch and thus extended the freeze, and that was a very difficult upstream kernel bug. However, I am also convinced that the extra time that bought us has resulted in a significant quality improvement in the release as a whole as loads of issues in Etch were discovered and fixed in that period. Note also that the Release Managers have been relatively liberal in what they would accept into Etch for a fairly long time during the freeze, although I totally agree with them that that does not extend to accepting new upstream versions of major desktop environments. Cheers, FJP
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