On Sun, Dec 13, 1998 at 12:33:43PM -0700, Bdale Garbee wrote: > In article <[🔎] E0zpEQi-0003dS-00@resnet217-203.resnet.buffalo.edu> you wrote: > > : Slink was supposed to be frozen in mid-October, to be released in > : mid-November, so it could be out and available by now. We've had a > : bumpy freeze (like usual), and now it's mid-December. > > Grrr. > > Until we collectively realize that it isn't rational to have a release process > that picks an arbitrary day to just declare that what was unstable is all of > a sudden a release candidate... we are doomed to repeat this experience. Part of the problem is IMHO the obsession with our software being Officially BugFree[tm]. How many of those 50 bugs are in vital packages? How many of them really ARE release-critical in some way? I would hazard a guess that not many of the above fall into both categories; the rest can be dealt with normally (remove package or downgrade bug and release anyway). Also, I would like to point out that hamm now has rather a lot of release-critical bugs; primarily security problems in the kernel. But people will still use it and I don't think it will reflect very badly on Debian. What will is if we stick to the usual thing of long drawn-out testing. Lets face it: we are a VOLUNTEER organization. This means that however good our testing effort is, it will still be done in people's free time, and might take a while. The only way to get the process improved is to have greater levels of testing during the unstable phase. Thus the sooner a maintainer releases his new code (rather than keeping it local to his machine until the deep-freeze happens), the sooner any bugs will be picked up, the more time he has to fix them. Greater flexibility in the release system == Greater stability of the OS -- Tom Lees <tom@lpsg.demon.co.uk> <tom@debian.org> http://www.lpsg.demon.co.uk/ PGP Key: finger tom@master.debian.org, http://www.lpsg.demon.co.uk/pgpkeys.asc.
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