Re: Debian's problems
On 12-Sep-99, 22:13 (CDT), Aaron Van Couwenberghe <vanco@sonic.net> wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 12, 1999 at 11:00:19PM -0400, Joe Drew wrote:
> > Limits can be brought about by doing one thing, that everyone
> > will bitch and moan about: /not/ forking off into unstable once
> > potato freezes, and having every single maintainer of every single
> > critical bug incessantly tortured about it until it is fixed, if
> > it's possible to be fixed. Believe me, frozen will be finished
> > quickly.
>
> Neglecting to open up unstable for development after a freeze will *not*
> speed up release cycles. Think about it. A very large group of debian's
> developers are highly specialized. If you take away their work, many of them
> would sit idle until unstable *did* finally get rolling.
Nothing is taking away their ability to work. They can still prepare new
versions of their packages. If it's something big like X or perl, the
appropriate people can band together and coordinate there work.
There's two kinds of "highly-specialized" developers: those whose
concentrate almost exclusively on their own packages (and I admit I fall
into that group), and those who work on big complicated things, like the
boot floppies or X or perl or glibc or dpkg or apt or... Those people
will be busting butt up until the minute of the release, making sure
everything works together (or else taking a well-earned break when their
piece makes the grade).
> It's not like we can dictate where people will spend their time in debian.
> If you take away someone's freedom, he will most likely just sit on his
> hands.
Fine. If they can't bear to (help) fix a bug just because it's not in
their package, let 'em sit. We wouldn't be dictating what they work on,
just what they can upload. BFD.
> So if Joe developer usually takes 3 months to get a working, finished
> package of his extremely complex package 'foo' perfected, delaying
> unstable's appearance for 2 months will just change joe's time to 3+2 = 5
> months.
They can work on that package. They can put up test versions. But we
shouldn't have a free-for-all unstable branch until after the release.
If only one out of five developers says "gee, if I go fix this bug, were
that much closer to release", then it's better than what we have now.
Steve
--
Steve Greenland <vmole@swbell.net>
(Please do not CC me on mail sent to this list; I subscribe to and read
every list I post to.)
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