Re: Linux 2.0.36 in slink?
On Sun, Dec 20, 1998 at 07:22:50PM -0800, Joseph Carter wrote:
> You were arguing against the one proposal I've seen to help make releases
> easier to make faster without compromising quality in another thread, but
> you haven't yet given a reason why the change is bad and you haven't
> addressed why some of us believe the changes are good, only that in your
> mind the changes aren't going to solve the whole problem. The parts of
> the problem it doesn't solve seem not to be archive related.
I have made such statements in previous messages. Sigh.
My point is simple. Creating another distribution doesn't improve our
ability to release more efficiently. It merely increses the testing
burden. Creating more distributions like stable and frozen and
unstable doesn't solve the real problems we're experiencing.
I see we have two problems right now. The Incoming->distribution can
take a long time when the touch of a human is required. We do this so
as to prevent frozen and stable from becoming neither (grin). In
addition, it is tricky to install packages from other distributions
because of the dependency changes. For example, packages in potato
could require new versions of underlying libraries that are not slated
for slink. Creating a complete prelease distribution gives us only an
indirect solution to these problems.
What makes more sense is to create an untested-<distribution> tree for
every distribution. All uploads go here via a fast, automated
process. This tree is replicated with the rest of the distributions,
but is not complete in of itself. Instead, developers (and users)
select packages to install and can choose to use the untested- version
of the main-stream one. Downgrading becomes simple. These files are
replicated with the archive so we can test changes quickly.
So there are two changes. Uploaded files are verified for developer
keys and inserted into the untested- tree ASAP. APT/dselect is
changed to permit users to choose the mainline version of a package or
the untested version. Note that the move from untested- to the
mainline is still done by humans after we have given some time to
testing the new packages.
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