Re: Release update: minor delay; no non-RC fixes; upgrade reports

[Adrian Bunk <bunk@stusta.de>]

On Tue, May 31, 2005 at 01:40:33AM +1000, Paul TBBle Hampson wrote:
> On Mon, May 30, 2005 at 01:19:48PM +0200, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> > On Mon, May 30, 2005 at 11:04:51PM +1200, Nigel Jones wrote:
> 
> > > http://bts.turmzimmer.net/details.php?ignore=sid&ignsec=on&fullcomment=on&new=7
> > > 
> > > thats a decent unoffical count...
> 
> > ... that doesn't (and can't) in any way address the problem I described 
> > in my email.
> 
> Couldn't you just pull the changelog entries for each package that differs
> between testing and unstable, pull the 'closes' entries for each of those, and
> "voila"? Grab severities from the BTS, cull those which are still open, and you
> have a "hidden RC bug" count. True, you don't get those which were closed with
> an email to control or -closes, but I'm sure it's only popular with people
> who're already keeping sarge-only bugs open manually, or for non-bugs.
> 
> And it's very hard to count bugs that don't appear in the BTS. ^_^

Yes, these are the hard part of the problem.
And you might not believe it, but your 1000 maintainers have several 
different qualities and strategies of bug handling.

If you'd freeze unstable (and I'd even keep unstable frozen after the 
start of the freeze) this whole problem wouldn't exist.

But in the current release process with testing, a proper solution that 
also attacks the hard parts of the problem is required.

> Of course, "voila" may actually take a significant amount of time... but could
> it be slower than the two hours it takes a human to do it?

It seems you misunderstood my email.

It doesn't take two hours of work to go through these issues.

I'm sometimes spending one or two hours for going through a _small_ 
subset of update_excuses. Please look yourself at update_excuses [1] (or 
at Jeroen's page) and estimate how long it takes to do a _comlete_ run 
through all these packages.

cu
Adrian

[1] http://ftp-master.debian.org/testing/update_excuses.html

-- 

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        of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
       "Only a promise," Lao Er said.
                                       Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed