Status of Potato
(Please send followups to debian-devel, not debian-devel-announce)
Potato looks ready to freeze. Its primary goals have been achieved,
and the only things left to do are to finish the bootdisks and fix
lots of bugs. I think it is advisable to freeze now, before we
start major new developments in potato.
Last weekend has shown that the bug count can be reduced rapidly
in intense sessions. We'll need more of those, and probably a large
number of packages will also have to be removed from frozen.
The freeze will be the coming weekend, on Sunday, November 7th.
Before the freeze, we will have to deal with the backlog in Incoming
somehow. There are more than 200 packages in it now and it's growing.
Help is on the way, but probably not in time. In any case, I do not
think it is wise to install a hundred new packages just before the
freeze! My plan is to handle all the packages that fix bugs, and
leave the rest for the new unstable.
After the freeze, I expect it will take a week or two for frozen to
settle down. A lot of bugs can be fixed in that time. This period
will be similar to the traditional freeze.
Then we can start with Test Cycles. These will address the problems
we had with the previous two freezes. A Test Cycle looks like this:
1. Boot disks and CD images are created.
2. The distribution is tested for a fixed amount of time. No changes
of any kind will be made to frozen during this time. Fixes for
problems that are discovered will of course be prepared, but they
will not be installed yet.
3. The results are evaluated. If the distribution is good enough to
release, it is released as it is.
4. Otherwise, fixes are installed, and if necessary, extra time is
taken to fix the problems.
5. New boot disks and CD images are created, and the cycle begins again.
Richard Braakman
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