On Sun, Oct 24, 2004 at 07:32:18AM +0200, Martin Schulze wrote:
> > You _are_ aware that this is approximately how it was done before woody, no?
> With three 1-month test cycles to get frozen into a reasonable and releaseable
> state?
Eh? potato was frozen on the 16th January, 2000; it was released on
the 15th of August. The freeze itself had originally been planned for
sometime late 1999, but was put on hold a couple of times.
version codename freeze-date release-date development/freeze
1.1 buzz ? 1996/06/17
1.2 rex ? 1996/12/12 6 months
1.3 bo ? 1997/06/05 6 months
2.0 hamm 1998/02? 1998/07/23 8 + 6 = 14 months
2.1 slink 1998/11/03 1999/03/10 4 + 4 = 8 months
2.2 potato 2000/01/16 2000/08/15 10 + 7 = 17 months
3.0 woody 2002/05/01 2002/07/20 20 + 3 = 23 months
? sarge ? >2004/10/20 >27 months
As far as test cycles are concerned, Richard proposed them on 1999/12/28,
with the first one scheduled for 2000/01/22, hoping that two would be
needed. Test cycle one began 2000/05/02 and ended with test cycle two.
Test cycle two began 2000/05/30 and ended 2000/06/24. Test cycle three
began 2000/07/06 and ended with the release, more or less. The start
of the test cycles were delayed due to boot-floppies not being ready,
and consisted of some "bug horizons", and other miscellania. Note that
for the entire period from January to August, _no_ packages were added
or updated in potato without inspection by the release manager; with
new features and non-RC bug fixes generally being immediately rejected.
That's where the feeling that stable is 7 months out of date before it's
even release comes from.
For hamm, slink and potato, we needed to spend around 43% of our time
frozen, working solely on fixing RC bugs. "Three one-month test cycles"
simply isn't an accurate summary of what freezing Debian entails.
YMMV on the woody "freeze" date; I'm choosing the date when britney stopped
running, but it's also worth considering packages that were uploaded but
"blocked" for various reasons, and updates that weren't uploaded because
we were trying to release.
Note that when considering the latter, updates for potato were also
"discouraged" for a month or two before the actual freeze; see [0], eg.
At present, the only packages not automatically propogating to testing
are packages in base. Even things as large as Gnome 2.6 have made it
into testing since May.
I'm tempted to say "What, then, are our choices? Note that `Release every
six months, at absolutely no cost' isn't one of them", but actually it
is: we can just grab whatever the Ubuntu guys put out and stick it in
our archive, at so close to zero cost as to be indistinguishable. That's
not quite a "Debian stable release", however -- it doesn't support as
many packages, or as many architectures; so maybe there is a cost even
then.
But "freeze, sweat blood fixing bugs, release" isn't a magic formula:
it results in spending over 40% of our time sweating blood rather than
doing fun stuff, and it still takes ages to actually do, given the size
of the distribution we have. And the freeze period is usually spent
screwing up unstable completely too, which creates yet more work for
the next time round (because everyone's testing frozen, bugs in unstable
get left to sit there for months, which makes them harder to fix because
whoever was working on them forgets, or moves on).
Note that warty/main is about 1/17th the size of Debian (which probably
underestimates the difference in complexity, if complexity isn't a linear
function of size), and that, conservatively, it has probably a hundred
times the direct funding Debian has -- though Debian might well surpass
Ubuntu if you also count indirect funding, but I've no idea how you'd
manage that.
Of course, the other problem with talk of a Debian freeze is finding
someone willing to manage it -- the last freeze we had was potato,
which managed to fairly thoroughly burn out Richard Braakman, and I
think we're something like four times bigger now than we were then,
just counting packages; another factor of two if you count architectures
(aiming for a factor of three).
Cheers,
aj
[0] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/1999/11/msg00000.html
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
Don't assume I speak for anyone but myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
``[S]exual orgies eliminate social tensions and ought to be encouraged.''
-- US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (http://tinyurl.com/3kwod)
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