Re: The nature of unstable (was: Danger Will Robinson! Danger!)
On Tue, Mar 14, 2000 at 10:01:15PM +1100, Craig Sanders wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 13, 2000 at 09:08:43AM -0500, Ben Collins wrote:
> > > Woody should be running 2.3 or pre-2.4. That should have been among
> > > the first things to change.
> >
> > We are knee deep in a release cycle. We should not be expending our
> > resources on woody right now.
>
> speak for yourself. not everyone in debian has your priorities. more to
> the point, your priorities are not the only valid ones.
>
> many people can (and ARE!) contribute a lot to woody, without impacting
> on frozen in the slightest.
Direct impact yes, indirectly though, we are short on needed resources for
getting potato release ready.
> > We should be making potato the best that it can be. Every release
> > cycle, peoples obsession with "this new thing" or "that latest beta"
> > is what makes the cycle so drawn out. With all of our resources we
> > should be able to wipe out every RC bug within a day (or atleast close
> > to all of them). The faster we get potato out the door, the sooner we
> > can start on those nifty new things to put into woody.
>
> then "fork" the stable release so that those who want to focus on it
> exclusively can do so without being distracted by those attracted by the
> shiny new toys...and those who want to work on new stuff don't have to
> be distracted by the test & freezing cycle. and some people will happily
> work on both.
Sorry that getting the next stable release out the door is such a
distraction. I'll try to see if there is some way we can keep this messy
part of Debian out of your way.
> you can't force everyone to work on frozen, trying to do so is not only
> highly undesirable it would be completely broken and counter-productive.
> volunteers work on what they want, when they want, and they contribute
> according to their abilities and their availabile time - many have
> nothing that they can contribute to stable or frozen, so they work on
> unstable. that is good, that is as it should be.
I don't recall saying anything about forcing. Maybe you mistook
"encourage" for "force". I don't know, maybe those two words are too
similar for you for some reason. Not my issue though, I still think we
need to encourage people to work on frozen until it's completely out the
door.
> debian's release cycle persists in being so slow because people persist
> in seeing debian's release in the same terms as a commercial operating
> system.
>
> the only viable way to speed that up is to implement the package pool
> idea, coupled with reasonably frequent "snapshot" releases and less
> frequent but fully-tested "stable" releases.
Package pools are not an end all and frequent snapshots and less frequent
stable releases are only doable when we have people working on it. Since
you think that encouraging people to work on it is not ok, then I don't
see how we can have the resources to do this. The only people who see
Debian release cycles as commercial are the ones outside of Debian who
think we need to "compete" and "market". I don't see how that directly
affects the release cycle itself.
Any way, package pools wont come till after potato, since it is (and
should be) still the first priority right now.
Ben
--
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/ Ben Collins -- ...on that fantastic voyage... -- Debian GNU/Linux \
` bcollins@debian.org -- bcollins@openldap.org -- bmc@visi.net '
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