Some questions to the release manager
Hi Anthony,
could you please tell your opinion on the three problems I explain below
regarding the freeze. These are the most important points of the
discussions the last days. These are just my personal opinions on things I
dislike at the current freeze and it might be that I'm wrong at one or
more of them but if yes please explain why.
I've Cc'ed debian-devel since there were some other developers that agreed
in one or more points with me and that might be interested in your
answers, too.
1. It's not predictable when packages will be removed from testing
Packages with RC bugs like armagetron or elastic are removed without any
warning at more or less random time. It will IMHO harm Debian as a whole
when popular applications will be missing from the next stable release
without a good reason (some users will say: "What, you have over 5000
packages but this popular application is not in your stable
distribution?").
2. We try to get non-frozen packages in a releasable state
E.g. boot-floppies depend on _many_ non-base packages - and all of these
non-base packages are non-frozen and a new upstream version of any of
these packages might break boot-floppies (see e.g. #127405) and for other
standard+tasks packages themselves it's quite usual that new upstream
versions get uploaded. I see a big problem in this "get it bug-free before
it gets frozen" approach because in practice this means we try to get a
moving target bug-free.
3. It seems the divided freeze doesn't work as expected
My personal impression is that it doesn't work to freeze parts of the
distribution doesn't work in the sense that it costs more time - while
it's hard to get one part of the distribution completely in a releasable
state the rest of the distribution stays unfrozen and new upstream
versions introduce new bugs in the unfrozen packages.
TIA
Adrian
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