Re: A "progressive" distribution
In article <[🔎] 20000316113743.X1373@taz.net.au> you wrote:
You know, the whole concept of 'a release' is orthogonal to the way I think
about Debian. We've been through that before, too, and I understand the
various reasons that it's important for us to "make a release" from time to
time... but I doubt any of my machines will ever run "a release". The beauty
of the Debian development model in the presence of sufficient network
bandwidth is that you don't have to wait until some release happens to get
new functionality or bug fixes... The "package pool" concept on some level
is just an efficiency hack for managing the master archive site better, but
it is also fundamental enabling technology for supporting the idea of having
multiple simultaneous "flavors" of Debian.
> this is the workhorse of the package pools/rolling release idea, this is
> where there will be the most work to be done, fine-tuning the criteria
> (and probably the source of the loudest and longest debates).
Absolutely. What I realized after talking to Manoj at some length face-to-face
at the Usenix Tech conference in New Orleans a couple of years ago is that we
will need to have different "snapshots" (I actually don't like that name)
with different criteria. He and I had a fundamental difference of opinion
about how automated the package promotion to stability should be. I think we
both had reasonable approaches, and there's no reason not to implement both
if people want them.
The beauty of the package pool concept is that the cost of each "flavor" is
pretty low, so there's no reason we can't have a number of them. Some might
be different levels of stability towards "a release", some might be proper
subsets like Debian Jr. There are a number of secondary issues, like how
many versions of each package you can afford to have in the pool before you
run out of disk space, but those are all manageable... and we'll learn by
doing.
I gathered from Guy's email a while back that a prototype might be underway
on a Debian machine somewhere. I have spent a bunch of time talking with the
other developers at work, one of whom gets paid to do revison control and
release management for a living, about this. I believe there are enough
interested people willing to work that we *will* have something in place
before woody, but I've promised myself that I won't personally do any more
work on package pools until potato releases.
Bdale
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