Re: Ubuntu discussion at planet.debian.org

[Jérôme Marant <jmarant@nerim.net>]

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho <ajk@debian.org> writes:

> On 20041022T134825+0200, Jérôme Marant wrote:
>> Before "testing", the RM used to freeze unstable and people were
>> working on fixing bugs. There were pretest cycles with bug horizons,
>> and freezes were shorter.
>
> That's not true (unless you are talking about something that was ceased
> several years before testing became live, certainly before I started
> following Debian development in 1998).  Before testing the RM used to
> fork unstable into a "frozen" distribution.  Unstable was still open for
> development, and heated arguments developed on this very list asking
> that the process be changed so that unstable would be frozen; this was
> never done.
>
> I don't know what you mean by "pretest cycles with bug horizons".
>

You are correct. It seems so old to me that I didn't even recall
it was a fork. This indeed explains why that process had to
be improved. It also explains why the current process needs to
be improved as well.

Thanks to Ubuntu, we now have a good example of what's proven
to work.

> The current freeze has been quite short - if one ignores the current
> delay by the missing testing security support - and pre-testing freezes
> were not that much shorter (unless, again, one looks at ancient history.
> when Debian was a lot smaller).

I was refering to the woody freeze.

>> Instead of always telling than a given idea won't work, let's
>> try it and conclude afterwards.
>
> The problem is that on this scale trying such things out is costly and
> time-consuming.  Arguably were are still in the process of trying
> "testing".

I didn't says "let's try it right now", and certainly not while trying
to release Sarge.

-- 
Jérôme Marant

http://marant.org