Re: problems with the concept of unstable -> testing

[Bastian Venthur <venthur@debian.org>]

Holger Levsen schrieb:
> Hi,
> 
> On Montag, 15. Dezember 2008, Bastian Venthur wrote:
>> Something like that, I don't really care about the name. The important
>> thing is, that unstable is never frozen, but temporarily disconnected
>> from the unstable > testing > stable flow.
> 
> That's the way it is. 
> 
> Have you fixed an RC bug today or at least this week? I mean, are you 
> contributing that this _temporarily disconnect_ is really temporarily?

To be honest, I'm actually counterproductive by developing reportbug-ng,
a tool which helps users to write bugreports instead of fixing them...

Sarcasm aside, that is a question I hear very often when speaking about
Lenny's release. It's like the sledgehammer argument, to silence those
who dare to criticize.

I think this question is nonsense. While the bug-fix rate was more or
less the same since the last two releases, it looks like in this release
we actually started the freeze with much more RC-bugs than before. So it
was foreseeable that the freeze will take longer this time. We can't
solve the problem by fixing bugs faster (that won't work anyways). So
what's the point of asking how many RC-bugs one has fixed? Does that
mean only those are allowed to make suggestions, who fixed an RC bug?

> I find it very strange to see people complaining about the long freeze, 
> instead of working on making it shorter.

I actually made a suggestion how to avoid a freeze in unstable, since
looking at the length of the freeze times of the last two releases and
the current one it seems that this model doesn't scale very well.

I'm not going around, telling people "hurry up, fix your bugs so we can
release!" I know that it will take a certain time to fix the current
number and that's ok. I just don't want unstable to be frozen during
this time.

> If we decouple the freeze from development in unstable, the result will that 
> less people will be working on releasing, thus the freeze will take even 
> longer.

I don't know if that will happen, but I'm pretty sure that if we get an
even longer unstable-freeze period in our next release, users will just
walk away to a more modern distro.


Cheers,

Bastian


-- 
Bastian Venthur                                      http://venthur.de
Debian Developer                                 venthur at debian org