Re: What has happened.
On Tue, 6 Jul 1999, jim westveer wrote:
> On 7/6/99, 10:43:50 AM, Jens Ritter <jens@hilbert.weh.rwth-aachen.de>
> wrote regarding What has happened.:
>
> > One thing which did not come up on this list (but on -devel I think)
> is:
>
> > How do we do quality checking with images? Do we want to send some
> > BETA images to a team of testers? It seems that though the freeze
> period of
> > slink was rather long, some bugs still slipped through.
>
> Yea that was a long thread....I offered to make a handful (10 or so)
> beta CD's for who-ever is on the testing team, and suggested if others
> would do a few, we could perhaps solve the problem of getting
> beta images to the testers. Although I think it is a good idea,
> I would not know to whom I would send anything to...perhaps I should
> write the "testing" mail list, and bring up the subject again.
There's also another reason for making beta images: documentation. I'm
maintaining the Dutch Debian Manual, which is quite release specific (that's
the way newbies like it). When a new Debian release is available, I need to
update my manual, which is quite some work (e.g. the X section from 2.0 to
2.1...).
With the 2.1 release, I got the impression (may be wrong!) that new `testing'
images were made every few days. I'm able to download those and burn them for
my own purposes, but 1) there was quite some "disorder" on the FTP sites and
2) there always was a risk of an image being deleted/replaced during my
(possibly long) download. So I didn't do anything and just waited for the
final official images to appear, and only then I could start updating my docs.
Therefore, it might be wise to make one (and only one) beta (="pre-final")
set of images/CDs. Make it available on only one (fast) FTP site and announce
it properly, and possibly burn some CDs and mail them to testers. Then wait
two weeks, to give testers/doc-writers/etc. opportunity to review things.
After those 2 weeks, make the final/official CD set on which only A) the doc/
dir contents may change and B) only critical layout-`bugs' are solved (like
the older-i386 stuff in 2.1r0, and maybe dpkg-multicd).
You will all know those "ReadMe" files on commercial CDs that state "These are
some important last-minute additions to the printed manual". With Debian it's
quite the other way around -- I'm providing some printed material along with
the CDs because the CDs are "buggy". I must say the "commercial" way is far
more appealing to me.
Regards,
Anne Bezemer
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