On Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 02:53:54PM +1100, Glenn McGrath wrote: > > _IF_ (big if) a better release process could be devised, then it would > be stupid not to consider it. Then how come we haven't considered one yet? Joel specifically mentioned FreeBSD at the beginning of this thread. I use that OS daily in my job, and yes, they have a *vastly* better release process than ours. They release about 3 times a year, and all their releases are of very high quality. Most of their releases are not as major as the potato -> woody transition, but they don't need to be. The previous release was not so out of date that a huge game of catch-up must be played to get current software included in the next. Now, I grant that Debian has certain issues that are not presently holding up FreeBSD. In particular, FreeBSD currently only supports x86 and Alpha (with SPARC64 on the way), so they have fewer portability things to hold them up. But they do have a fairly similar development model to ours. I think we could learn from them. I think that a shortened release cycle could help us. As it is now, it is basically "go until the release manager says stop". Instead, if we commit to freezing after 6 or 9 months of development, then spending a couple of months fixing the frozen distribution, I think we could still keep our high quality stable releases, but not have them be so out of date. I know it's too late to affect any major changes to the release process in time for woody, but I think something definitely needs to change if we are to provide a high-quality, useful distrubution to our users. And I know that the short-term goal of getting woody released is very important. But if we don't start thinking about these changes now, then we won't implement them in time to release woody+1 in a timely manner, and they will all be for naught. noah -- _______________________________________________________ | Web: http://web.morgul.net/~frodo/ | PGP Public Key: http://web.morgul.net/~frodo/mail.html
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