On Sun, Oct 24, 2004 at 03:48:04AM -0700, Michael K. Edwards wrote: > On Sat, 23 Oct 2004 01:04:41 +0200, Jérôme Marant <jmarant@nerim.net> wrote: > > As soon as testing is strictly equal to unstable regarding package > > versions, testing is roughly ready for release. > If Jérôme's observation is correct, then I don't need to worry; > unstable will converge to a consistent state under the watchful eyes > of the RM (and many others), testing will rise to meet it, and the > worst that might happen is that some of the packages I've chosen could > be excluded from sarge because of a quality problem or an ill-timed > maintainer absence. It is not correct. At the time testing freezes for sarge, there are likely to be many packages in unstable which either have no version in testing, or have older versions in testing. The list of such packages is always visible at <http://ftp-master.debian.org/testing/update_excuses.html.gz>. While it's a goal of the release team to ensure that *incidental* issues don't keep package fixes/updates out of testing, there are plenty of package updates which will come too late for consideration, or will be RC-buggy in their own right, that won't be part of sarge. And immediately *after* the freeze point, I think we can safely expect unstable to begin diverging even further from testing. > In this light (and for my purposes), the only sensible place to branch > stable off from unstable is at a point where the major subsystems are > all going to be reasonably maintainable on the branch. Perhaps we're > close to such a point now and just haven't been for a while, for > reasons largely beyond the Debian project's control. (Apart from the > definition of its "major subsystems", that is; note that Ubuntu > doesn't expect to be able to provide the level of support for KDE that > they plan for Gnome, and it appears to me that the effect of changes > in the C++ toolchain on KDE has been a significant factor in delaying > sarge. Do tell me if I'm mistaken about that, but please don't flame > too hard; I'm not casting aspersions on KDE or g++/libstdc++, just > recording an impression.) While getting KDE updates into testing has been a significant task in the past, I'm not aware of any point during the sarge release cycle when KDE has been a factor delaying the release. -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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