Re: Some thoughts about problems within Debian
On Thursday 03 January 2002 05:24 pm, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> One important thing are more frequent releases. We don't have to release
> as often as other distributions but IMHO it's needed to have a new stable
> release at about once a year. Currently the software in our stable release
> is two years old and I see several distributors and magazines already ship
> woody CDs instead of potato CDs although we are still several months away
> from releasing woody - and if people encounter problems with the packages
> they find there this does in the long term harm the good reputation of the
> quality of our packages. There are many reasons why you need packages you
> can't find in potato. Sometimes it's only that you want to use Gimp 1.2
> but often there are important reasons like e.g. support for kernel 2.4 or
> Euro support in some applications. Using testing isn't an alternative on
> many production systems because testing reduces the probality of bugs but
> it could still happen that e.g. your X does no longer start after your
> latest upgrade to testing.
Do we have a list anywhere of the remaining issues holding up the
woody freeze/release? Some sort of well-known "release status" Web page
would help coordination. (we have an RC bug list, but as far as I know it
doesn't show, eg, which bugs need to be fixed for the next stage of the
freeze)
There are the periodic emails from ajt, of course, but they tend to
end up piled in mail archives, and aren't updated when new problems come up
and old ones are fixed (hopefully such a Web page would be)
I have some other ideas about what might be slowing things down, but
I suspect that Anthony has a much clearer idea of what the problem is.
In fact, I just realized that I don't really even know what the plans,
goals, and checklist (if we have one) for this release are. (I hope that
admission of ignorance is acceptable here, but I suspect that I'm not
alone)
I know that we need to get rid of as many of the 382 release-critical
bugs as possible, but beyond that I'm not certain at all. Is that it?
Daniel
Reply to: