Re: Debian's problems
On Mon, Sep 13, 1999 at 10:46:49PM -0500, Steve Greenland wrote:
> On 12-Sep-99, 22:13 (CDT), Aaron Van Couwenberghe <vanco@sonic.net> wrote:
> > 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.
yes, it is. by locking out unstable you are preventing their work from
being tested, and thus preventing them from getting valuable feedback.
developers work on what they have time to work on, they work on what
they feel like working on. if you prevent them from working on those
things, most will either sit idle or leave in disgust rather than
be forced to work on stuff that they have no particular interest or
skill in doing. debian is a volunteer organisation - you can't force
volunteers to work on stuff that they don't want to do...all you can do
is take advantage of the energy they put into things that they DO want
to do.
> 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.
yes, it IS a big deal.
we've been over this argument many times over the last few years: there
is no good reason to stop people working on unstable just because a
frozen release is being worked on.
all you achieve is to piss off developers who have little or nothing
to contribute to frozen/stable but who have a lot to contribute to
unstable.
if YOU want to work on the stable release, then go right ahead, it's
useful and important work to do....but don't force everyone else to work
on YOUR goals - some developers don't even give much of a damn about
stable releases because they feel that "unstable" IS debian...alongside
debian policy, the ability to upgrade easily and regularly off the net
is what distinguishes debian from lesser distributions.
i'm somewhere in the middle - i think stable releases are nice (but not
vitally essential) and it would be great if they happened more often.
in short, it's up to the release team to make a release - and any
developer is free to join in.
craig
--
craig sanders
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