On Tue, 21 Sep 2010 20:52:09 -0400 Yaroslav Halchenko <debian@onerussian.com> wrote: > Hi All, > > CUT discussions at debconf10 and recent news of the birth of Linux > Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) [1] show how valuable and unique Debian's > rolling distribution (testing) is. But every freeze in the > preparation to upcoming stable release in effect, eliminates > 'testing' (and actually unstable... I don't see what that is meant to mean. Testing and unstable are constantly present and functional during a freeze. What happens is that the pace of new (disruptive) uploads and migrations is manually limited. i.e. the stability and functionality of testing and unstable *rise* during a release freeze simply because new transitions are not started - in unstable or testing. Unstable needs to be managed during a freeze because it is the destination of uploads which fix RC bugs in testing. If there was a new migration/transition in unstable affecting this package, the new upload cannot migrate (and cannot fix the bug). Testing-proposed-updates isn't an excuse for making a mess of unstable during a freeze. > since experimental is not a > complete distribution and we can't force users to use something with > that name ;) ) until new stable sees the world. I wondered, why don't > we have > > [experimental/]unstable(sid)/testing(e.g squeeze)/stable > > *constantly* present and functioning all the time the same way. So when and where are library transitions meant to occur? Transitions are always disruptive, always cause some packages to be non-functional or non-installable. There has to be somewhere (unstable) where libfoo2 can be uploaded with libfoo2-dev so that all packages which depend on libfoo1 can start the migration to the new API. As the migration starts, there is a period (which in the case of GTK1->2 took several years) where many packages in unstable are uninstallable or FTBFS or just horribly buggy. > Then upon freeze we just copy the state of > unstable -> pending > testing(squeeze) -> frozen(squeeze, e.g together with a codename) > and link new codename (e.g. wheezy) against testing. unstable is not compatible with *-proposed-updates - nor is having *-proposed-updates an excuse for starting new transitions in unstable during a freeze. > Then unstable/testing would roll further as usual How does a major, disruptive, transition get done? >, and pending->frozen > according to the freeze schedule. This would enable CUTs, fulfill > the ideas behind LMDE to have something rolling without hickups, and > users of 'testing' (and unstable) would enjoy testing/unstable the way > they usually do. > > I understand that it would require more work, but I think benefits > would overweight the burden. > > But I cannot be first thinking about that, and I bet there were good > reasons why such approach was not taken -- could anyone > enlighten/point me to the shortcomings? In a word, transitions. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/ http://e-mail.is-not-s.ms/
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