On Tue, Jan 02, 2001 at 07:03:44AM +0000, John O Sullivan wrote:
> On Tue, 02 Jan 2001 05:38:36 Branden Robinson wrote:
> > I don't have any concrete recommendations for how to take this into
> > account, but I certainly think that a 14-day waiting period for
> > packages like these is excessive.
I'm not seeing the "excessive"-ness, here, I guess. "testing" isn't a
replacement for unstable: if you want the latest and greatest stuff, and
you don't want to wait for it, you go with unstable.
At the moment, X is a bad example to be using: you're still in the
middle of a huge update and reorganisation with both arm and m68k still
"broken" as far as X is concerned. If you're still updating once a week
or more often by the time everything's stable and working, then... Well,
I dunno, but something.
> I agree with you. Lots of popular packages shouldn't need 2 weeks for
> obvious bugs to be noticed, but I think that most packages should wait
> 2 weeks to get reasonable quality in testing. That means that not all
> packages should have the same waiting time. Is there some way that
> maintainers could take responsibility for deciding how long the
> waiting period should be?
And again, if the maintainer's got a version done that they think's
suitable for testing, and they're sure it doesn't have any lurking bugs,
they can just set the urgency to 'medium' or 'high'. It's probably not too
unreasonable to treat urgency as "how sure I am this package is fine". For
most packages, you're not too sure; for security updates one would hope the
security team are quite sure that the update is safe.
But really, we're in the first couple of weeks of using this, can we at
least try it as is before worrying about how to tweak it?
> On a slightly related topic, packages that are updated everyday are a
> big headache for those of us that are living at the end of a modem,
> because we have to update many 10's of packages a day == lots of
> downloading.
You'll note the 14 day rule has the cute property that once a package is
placed in testing, it'll be at least 14 days before it's replaced. (On
the day it gets included in testing, it's also the latest version
uploaded to unstable; if the very next day a new version is uploaded,
it'll still take 14 days before that version is considered for testing
and until then the existing version will just sit there).
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.
``Thanks to all avid pokers out there''
-- linux.conf.au, 17-20 January 2001
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