Re: how about a real unstable?

[Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au>]

On Tue, Mar 28, 2000 at 02:14:39PM -0500, Elie Rosenblum wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 28, 2000 at 09:09:43AM -0800, Andrew Lenharth wrote:
> > It is the unstable branch, lets take advantage of it and make it
> > unstable to start out with.  The sooner we can find problems and fix
> > them, the shorter our release cycles will be, and the more upto-date
> > our main packages will be.
>
> This is what experimental is for, no?
>
> Unstable is for unstable Debian, not necessarily unstable
> software. The experimental distribution is much more appropriate for
> unstable upstream software.

i agree. the proposal would do nothing for 'stable', it would only make
'unstable' unusable - so we'd be left with an ancient and obsolete
'stable' release and a useless 'unstable'.

the stable release cycle is slow because it's a big job to test
thousands of packages. deliberately making unstable more dangerous isn't
going to solve that problem, it's going to make it worse - and at the
same time increase the pressure on the release team.

the only thing that is likely to speed up the release cycle is the
rolling release part of the package-pools idea....which, if you examine
how it is supposed to work, actually works by making unstable MORE
stable, not less - packages only get promoted from incoming/"holding"
to unstable when they pass certain tests (e.g. lintian test, all
dependancies met, no bug reports for XX days)...and they only get
promoted from unstable to frozen when they pass more tests. in other
words, it automates as much of the job as is possible.


personally, i'm not going to hold my breath waiting for the stable
release cycle to speed up. it's a big job, and one that grows enormously
for every release. we had around 2000 packages for slink. we now have
approx 4000 for potato....and already nearly 5000 for woody - and potato
isn't even out the door!

i'm glad i don't have to wait. unstable is more than good enough for
use on production servers (and has been the entire time i've been using
debian - almost 5 years now)

craig

--
craig sanders