Re: Debian doesn't have to be slower than time.
On Sat, 16 Feb 2002 00:24:49 -0700
"Joel Baker" <lucifer@lightbearer.com> wrote:
> You said, above, that you don't agree with my answers; would you be
willing> to offer alternatives for discussion?
I think ideally the stable release would operate just like the testing
release, but instead of having a 10 day window to proove itself stable
should require a package to have been in testing for a longer time,
maybe 30 or 60 days (more?). It would give end users a rolling stable
release which would make it on average the most upto date stable release
of any distro, and buggy packages wouldnt make it in, or be removed.
People who couldnt come to grips with a rolling release could make a
snapshot at any time and it should be bug free.
Im not sure about the downsides though, it may put much more pressure on
testing and make QA much harder.
As far as bugs go, currently every bug that relates to a non-orphaned
package is already assigned to a debian developer, if there are easily
fixable bugs that arent being looked after by the maintainer, then that
maintainer isnt (in a practical sense) maintaining the package (Absentee
maintainer). Maybe we should consider that in some circumstances a
package would be better off being taken away from its maintainer and
orphaned, at least that way its got more of a chance of someone else
adopting it and taking responsibility for it. Maybe we should make it
easier for multiple people to be in charge of consistantly troublesome
packages.
NMU's are better than nothing, but unless the official maintainer has
asked for help then we are just putting out spotfires and ignore the
cause. A package that has been NMU'ed a few times has a few people who a
familiar with it, and therefore it would take less effort for them to do
future work on it than others, those people would make a good secondary
maintainer if the primary (official) maintainer isnt (in a practical
sense) maintaining it.
Glenn
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