Re: 2.4.0!

[Joseph Carter <knghtbrd@debian.org>]

On Fri, May 26, 2000 at 01:24:18AM -0400, Mike Bilow wrote:
> I disagree with this.  I think, as I said emphatically and repeatedly,
> that the solution is more frequent full releases and shorter release
> cycles.  I would ideally like to see Woody release about six months after
> Potato.  I think the Potato release should be followed by about three
> months of aggressive integration of new packages into Woody and then about
> three more months of freeze and testing leading to release of Woody.

Not to put too fine a point on this, but just HOW THE HELL do you propose
to shorten release cycles?  I've watched Hamm, Slink, and now Potato go
through the same things.  Everyone wants to shorten release cycles, but
every attempt made to do so is totally ineffective.

When I met last summer with several Debianites over dinner (among them
joeyh, wichert, gecko, and others), it was generally agreed by all of us
that the only way to shorten release cycles was to either start making
incremental releases or to move toward a unstable being a pool which
packages deemed stable enough to release are picked from and tested in a
nearly constant release preperation modality.

If you think about it, both of these schemes boil down to the same
prospect:  Adding packages as they become stable to an already stable
distribution.


Three months of aggressive development in unstable is going to require a
six month freeze at the bare minimum.  It's happened before, several
times.  The larger Debian gets, the more true this will be and the longer
the release cycle is going to take.  What makes you think the next release
will be different?  dark thought Potato would be different.  Was it?  Not
really.


> This would guarantee that nothing would be more than three months behind
> when the release is declared stable, and also would make it more likely
> that packages could be pulled individually from unstable and used on
> stable (by users who need to do that) because there would be much less
> distance between stable and unstable.  Almost no Potato packages work on
> Slink now, since there are such wide variations in libc6 requirements and
> all sorts of other pervasive things.
> 
> I regard it as unwise to upgrade major components which touch everything
> (such as libc6, xfree86, or gnome) separately without extensive testing.

You seem to think that this extensive testing of major system component
upgrades can happen in equal time after agressive development which
history has shown breaks things, ESPECIALLY when done on the scale of
Debian.  Do your homework.  What you propose has been tried time and
again with failure each time.  Come up with something that has a chance,
I'm tired of rehashing what experience shows does not and cannot work time
and again.

-- 
Joseph Carter <knghtbrd@debian.org>               GnuPG key 1024D/DCF9DAB3
Debian GNU/Linux (http://www.debian.org/)         20F6 2261 F185 7A3E 79FC
The QuakeForge Project (http://quakeforge.net/)   44F9 8FF7 D7A3 DCF9 DAB3

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