Re: Summary of CUT discussions (Was: unstable/testing/[pending/frozen/]stable)
On Thu, 23 Sep 2010 14:30:30 +0200, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> Personally I would like to have snapshots every 2 or 3 months. Colin
> Watson pointed out in an LWN comment (http://lwn.net/Articles/406597/):
> | There's a good chance that CUT could serve a dual purpose of making it
> | easier to prepare new stable releases. As many projects have found, if you
> | have more-or-less releaseable checkpoints every so often then it's easier
> | to prepare a better-than-usual one for your gold release.
>
> And I agree with him in general. By officially endorsing a constantly
> usable rolling distribution, it's clear to everybody that what goes in
> unstable should always be in a releasable state.
There are of course a couple large downsides to this. It becomes next
to impossible to make big/interesting changes across the distribution,
and developers will be forced (due to the short time frame) into being
very conservative with their uploads. Today, maintainers have the
important freedom to make big changes at the beginning of the release
cycle knowing that they have over a year to fix any resulting
problems, and I think it would be a shame to take that away.
I view testing snapshots more as a preview for a very limited subset of
users; the type that are looking for rather fresh software and would be
perfect candidates for testing, but they aren't willing to deal with
the daily upgrade treadmill. Again, I think this is a rather small
group of users. Mosts users that fall into the "I need the latest
shiny" category are served fairly well by the existing testing. They
just need a constantly working installer.
Best wishes,
Mike
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