Re: testing and no release schedule
On Fri, Mar 26, 2004 at 01:42:50AM +0100, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> There are always reasons to say "hey, we managed to get A, B and C into
> testing, and the next goals are getting D, E and F into testing". But is
> this real progress towards the next stable release, or will after F is
> achieved only G, H and I arrive?
It is clearly frustrating for us when we manage to heave a huge pile of
improvements into testing only to find that people say "oh, but you
can't release stable yet because <major-project> <major-new-version> has
just been released".
At the same time, we *have* to have a working installer; anything else
is just not an option. To some extent, the exact details of what version
of everything else we release with is a distraction, and is certainly
much more easily solved. (Not meaning to demean anyone's efforts, of
course, but I think it's clear that "our installer doesn't work yet"
usually overrides "we don't have a new enough version of <foo>".)
> It's quite frustrating that there's no clear schedule towards Debian 3.1
> that includes a date for the beginning of the freeze.
I'm sorry that there hasn't been a schedule posted since the 15th. This
is mostly because the release team have been working flat-out on other
things (I've been trying to make d-i work releasably on powerpc, and I
believe the same goes for Steve and d-i on alpha).
A new announcement is being prepared now, and should be available by
this weekend.
> When talking about a clear schedule, I'm not talking about something
> unrealistic like the schedule that told Debian 3.1 would be released on
> Dec 1st 2003 that included dates that were not based on any realistic
> estimates (esp. the installer dates).
The estimates did seem realistic at the time, actually, but it turned
out that the installer was further behind than was expected. We're now
much closer to a fully-working installer (there've already been lots of
very favourable installation reports along with the bugs, some saying
that it's already much better than woody's), and it's possible to make
better predictions.
> After the beginning of a freeze, there need to be several months to
> fix all bugs that get reported over time and to ensure that both new
> installations of Debian 3.1 and upgrades from Debian 3.0 to Debian 3.1
> work for everyone without problems.
However, long freezes are also problematic. They impede development and
cause much frustration: the potato freeze was a good example of this.
> The latest "Release update" [1] said "On or shortly after 15th March,
> we'll see if these targets have been met and update the schedule
> accordingly.". I sent on March 15th a suggestion of a "weak freeze" and
> how I'd help within it for unstable [2] plus two additional mails to the
> release managers and his assistants. I got one mail from you (Steve)
> stating that "At a glance, I don't see anything in the plan that
> conflicts with the Release Team's agenda." and that you wanted to answer
> during the next days a week ago, but no other feedback until now.
>
> I'm not claiming that my suggestion of a weak freeze of unstable is the
> only way to get closer towards Debian 3.1, but I'm a bit astonished that
> although it was announced that "shortly after 15th March" there will be
> an update of the release schedule, none of the release managers and his
> assistants had the time to either send an updated release schedule or to
> give an "yes" or a "no, we have a better plan" answer to my suggestion.
See above. I'm sorry that "shortly" has slipped more than we intended.
On the other hand, I'm not keen on the "I'll fix bugs when we freeze"
attitude; this is a chicken-and-egg situation. Bugs need to be fixed
*now* so that we can freeze with the confidence that we know
approximately how long the freeze will need to last.
If you don't want to fix bugs until we freeze, then please contribute
that effort to the new installer. That is the single most effective way
to speed up the next release right now.
> In the pre-testing times there was one release manager who announced a
> freeze date, and at that date unstable was frozen and at about half a
> year later there was a new stable release. Today, there are 4 people
> that do release management, but it seems neither possible to do any
> estimate when Debian 3.1 will release, nor does it seem that the
> release speed improved.
Remember that the difficulty of release management has increased very
substantially since the old days, due to the many-times-over increased
size of the distribution and the more and more labyrinthine nature of
our dependency structure. This consumes a great deal of release
management time, although the large-scale automation of testing makes
the job possible.
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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