Re: The sarge release disaster - some thoughts

[Martin Zobel-Helas <zobel@ftbfs.de>]

Hi Adrian,

On Tuesday, 15 Mar 2005, you wrote:
> The timeline for another failed release date:
> - August 2nd 2004: announcement
> - August 8th 2004: "Official security support for sarge begins"
> - September 15th 2004: announced release date
> 
> The milestone that included the start of the official security support 
> for sarge was only 6 days after the announcement, but is was missed by 
> more than 6 months.
> 
> Whyever it was expected to get testing-security for sarge that quick, it 
> should have been obvious 6 days later that it wasn't possible that 
> quick.
> 
> What would have been a second plan?
> Use testing-proposed-updates.
That wouldn't work eiter. T-P-U and T-S are using the very same chroot
on most machines. So if T-S doesn't work, T-P-U won't either.

The problem here is, that we were/are still missing wanna-build
databases for T-P-U/T-S for some architectures.


I think the real problem within Debian is the lack of communication of
some people within the project. If the wanna-build admins and/or the
ftp-masters would have said: "stop, were are still missing ...., without
it you will not be able to release" everyone would have understood.

Also i hoped the release team and the ftp-masters would have worked on
the current release instead of planing for the next on. Having all these
people together sitting in one room working on the current release would
have been much more prodcutive.

Perhaps they did. But they didn't told us. Also some lack of
communication.

At least, what the rest of the Debian community sees is the mail Steve
send via debian-devel-announce. This mail mainly covers etch, not sarge.

I wish all these people would communicate much more and tell us facts.

Greetings
Martin