On Fri, Aug 18, 2000 at 10:34:35AM +0100, Jules Bean wrote:
> I'd just like to bring up the only point which really worries me about
> all this... what is the incentive for people to run their machines on
> 'unstable'?
>
> Because a package lying for 3 weeks in unstable says nothing about it
> being bug-free if no one uses it...
Well, you've given the first reason why people would want to run
unstable right there: to find bugs and make sure testing's as stable
as possible. People might want to do this out of the goodness of their
hearts', or they might be running a server on testing and want to run a
desktop machine with unstable to make sure their server doesn't accidently
upgrade to something hideously buggy.
> but if unstable is now going to be
> really unstable, I can see lots of the people who currently use
> 'unstable' using 'testing' instead, satisfying their need for
> bleeding-edge..
Note that there's no particular reason for unstable to be any worse than
it is now. Your worst case is that there'll still be bugs in testing
that won't be detected before they hit a whole bunch of people. This is
no worse than our current situation with unstable.
Another reason to run unstable is to live on the actual bleeding edge:
testing will always be around two weeks out of date. That can be a fair
while, if you're impatient.
Supporting this, there's some Apt changes in CVS that'll let people choose
a few packages from one distribution and leave the rest from another. Two
possibilities come to mind: either running "testing" most of the time,
but using a bunch of programs from "unstable" because you're interested
in their development; or running mostly from "unstable" except for a few
packages you can't afford to have break on that machine. Either way you
have a slightly larger buffer between an upload and it making it into
"testing".
*shrug* If it turns out to be a problem, I think it'll end up being mostly
self correcting. And even if it's not, we're still in a better situation
than we are now because some bugs *definitely* won't make it into testing.
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
``We reject: kings, presidents, and voting.
We believe in: rough consensus and working code.''
-- Dave Clark
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