Re: Drop testing
On Sat, Oct 23, 2004 at 03:52:51PM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 23, 2004 at 02:33:24PM -0700, Brian Nelson wrote:
> > Gergely Nagy <algernon@bonehunter.rulez.org> writes:
>
> > >> It may sound a bit radical, but core points have been mentioned in the
> > >> thread already. I suggest to do it in a more radical way:
>
> > >> - unstable lockdown in the freeze
> > >> - drop Testing and concentrate on work instead of wasting time on
> > >> synching stuff. This eliminates the need for testing-security. See
> > >> the last part of the paper for details.
>
> > > Doing this would result in many users who currently run testing fall
> > > back to stable + backports or switch to another distro (ubuntu being a
> > > likely candidate), which in turn, would result in less bugreports and a
> > > less stable distribution.
>
> > Very few bug reports from testing users are of any value at all. They
> > usually either report some transient dependency problem that the
> > maintainer can't fix anyway, or report something that has already been
> > fixed in the unstable package.
>
> This seems like a rather unsubstantiated claim. Do you *know* how many of
> the good bug reports you've seen come from users of testing vs. unstable?
I don't have any hard data, but I've been tracking debian-bugs-dist for
about 2 years now so I think I have a decent feel for it. True, you
can't always be sure if the user is using testing or unstable, but it
often can be inferred.
[...]
> Yes, filing bug reports on testing is not often useful (except during a
> freeze), but that's not the same as it not being useful to have users
> running testing.
I didn't claim otherwise. I was just trying to refute the claim that
bug reports from testing users were useful.
I do question if having testing available to the public throughout the
entire release cycle is actually beneficial to the community. There's a
common misconception in the community that testing is a "more stable"
unstable. Many testing users aren't even aware that testing doesn't
have security updates. Probably most of the users of testing should
*not* be using it at all. This isn't really related to the proposal in
this thread to just drop testing though.
--
Blast you and your estrogenical treachery!
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