Re: Release update: minor delay; no non-RC fixes; upgrade reports
On Tue, May 31, 2005 at 04:29:31AM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Mon, May 30, 2005 at 12:59:26PM +0200, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> > Since it seems noone of the release team bothered to pay this part of
> > the price for the testing release process, I'm sometimes using one or
> > two spare hours to go a bit through update_excuses and report half a
> > dozen of such issues.
>
> > Steve saw this, and before the latest release update he sent (which was
> > the one before yours), he asked me in a private mail about a prediction
> > how many such RC bugs I'd expect in sarge for inclusion in his release
> > update.
>
> > It seems my prediction about the number of such issues didn't match his
> > wishes regarding the state of sarge, and he did therefore neither answer
> > my email nor mention this in the release update nor does it seem he
> > assigned a member of the release team to do this work properly.
>
> On the contrary, I found your answer reasonably satisfactory, and as a
> result had postponed replying to you in favor of dealing with more directly
> pressing release issues.
>
> You indicated that as of two weeks ago, you'd been through the "middle
> seventh" of update_excuses checking for unidentified RC bugs, and that most
> of the packages below this range were not in testing and therefore wouldn't
> hold many hidden RC bugs; and I've been tracking the status of RC bugs
> closed since the freeze began, which accounts for many (though not all) of
> the more recent uploads.
What's the current number of RC bugs you've tracked this way?
Am I right to assume that you count them when looking whether you reach
your 15 RC bugs in your metric you want to achieve today?
> So it is probably true that sarge will release with some RC bugs that could
> have easily been fixed had we known about them, but I don't think this
> number will be so great that we want to redirect resources or delay the
> release in order to try to catch them. I don't think it's realistic to
> charge the release team with identifying all RC bugs in the distribution,
> only to take care that we don't release with them once they are so
> identified.
Not "all RC bugs" (there are most likely many not yet reported RC bugs
in sarge).
It's "all RC bugs that are both known and already fixed in unstable".
It might sound old-fashioned, but Debian used to be famous for it's
stability.
I remember times when there where two weeks test cycles where the whole
thing was frozen with zero changes for at about a week, and if any
serious problems were found they were fixed and then there was the next
test cycle.
Why is there now always such a hurry to get everything out within a
week?
Why are there always extremely aggressive timelines (with at least three
publically announced release dates for sarge already passed) instead of
making everything more relaxed for being able to improve sarge without
being in a big hurry?
> > [1] And no, version tracking in the BTS wouldn't prevent this problem.
> > In my experience, there are so many of these issues reported with
> > a wrong version or manually closed or even without any bug report in
> > the BTS that claiming version tracking might eliminate this problem
> > sounds like a bad joke.
>
> <shrug> The problems you describe are not ones that would go away with the
> removal of testing; if maintainers are not engaged in the process of
> ensuring their packages are free of RC bugs for release, and do not take
> care that RC bugs are a) documented in the BTS, b) filed at the correct
> severity, and c) fixed in the version of the package that's releasing (in
> case something goes wrong with a and b), we are going to miss RC bugs that
> could have been caught. This is a social problem, not a technical one, and
> I don't think there are any viable technical solutions.
Relying on version tracking will add one more point where this existing
social problem might have negative impacts on the quality of your
releases.
> For my part, I have explicitly *not* given a free pass to packages with RC
> bugs that were filed a long time ago but only recently raised to their
> proper severity. It's great if bug submitters know what severity a bug
> should be filed at, but it's the *responsibility* of the maintainer to
> adjust the severity if it's wrong -- even if that means raising the
> severity, something none of us want to do. Even more, it's the maintainer's
> responsibility to *deal with* such bugs at the proper severity even if they
> were filed wrong. It simply can't be the responsibility of any central
> group to babysit the severities of bugs filed: that's not scalable in the
> least.
>
> So yes, sarge will ship with bugs that should have been considered RC. But
> this is inevitable in any case because of the many RC bugs that are never
> *identified* by our testing, so there's no reason for the release team to
> treat these bugs as blocking issues if no one cares enough to make sure
> they're brought to our attention. This doesn't mean that your work to
> identify overlooked RC bugs is any less valuable, Adrian, or that I'm any
> less grateful to you for it (in spite of the visceral irritation sometimes
> at seeing the bug count moving in the wrong direction ;). It just means
> having a pragmatic, big-picture view of what it means to release, and
> whether the improvement to sarge is worth it to our users every time we
> delay another week to fix a handful of bugs. After all, let's not forget
> that sarge is already quite good, and nothing to be ashamed of!
As said above, I still don't see why such a hurry was required.
Yes, woody is completely outdated. But a few weeks more or less until
sarge is released doesn't make the big difference.
Sarge will ship with software that isn't current (e.g. X11 is more than
two years old). That's not good, but Debian stable was never known for
being current. But it has a quite good reputation as being stable.
And if 6 June 2005 will be the fourth missed officially announced
release date for sarge the negative effect on the reputation of Debian
will most likely be bigger compared to the situation if you'd have
planned and announced a longer freeze.
> Steve Langasek
cu
Adrian
--
"Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
"Only a promise," Lao Er said.
Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed
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