Re: Summary of CUT discussions
Hi,
On Mon, 27 Sep 2010, Roland Mas wrote:
> >> What do you base this on? It does not at all seem clear to me that
> >> rolling would not introduce maintainers who only care about rolling.
> >
> > Nobody can predict the future... but my take is that the people who
> > only care about rolling would be the people who do not care of testing
> > right now already. Those who care about testing would continue to do
> > it.
>
> Without any hint as to how you came to that conclusion, this assertion
> can't be considered more than a gut feeling.
I agree, but the same holds for Luk's assertion that the introduction of
rolling will hurt the process of creating a stable release.
> > - internal to say to all contributors that testing/rolling is meant to be
> > always usable so you must be careful in everything you upload to sid, no
> > matter whether we're far from release or not and RC bugs are always
> > important to fix, and you must care about migration to testing/rolling
> > because many users will want the latest version in that distribution
>
> This is not a change in communication, it's a change in policy, and a
> huge one too. Right after a release has always been a time for
> experimenting and introducing intrusive changes to unstable. Telling
> maintainers they now need to refrain from these changes is not something
> that can be decided lightly. Especially since imposing extra
> restrictions on the work one does on Debian is going to be one more
> reason for people not to care about Debian. We're supposed to make
> working on Debian *easier*, not add extra barriers.
On a package-per-package basis, I don't think that anything changes. You
can do intrusive changes and have the package migrate only once you're
happy with your changes.
On a large scale, there's no change either, all migrations have to be
coordinated already and breaking sid at your will has not been an option
for quite some time.
Really, I think the shift is in the communication, not on the practice.
It's just that we tell us officially that we have users of testing/rolling
and we wish to give them a pleasant experience.
> > I don't know when rolling would be introduced, and I don't know when
> > squeeze will be released. If we start rolling during this freeze, we
> > will probably only do testing + hand-picked updates to make it more
> > usable (i.e. no automatic britney run from unstable to rolling).
>
> Who's this “we”? That's an honest question: so far I haven't seen
> much support from the release managers, so I wonder who's going to do
> the work of creating the new suite, defining its package migration
> policy and implementing that into the appropriate code, or doing the
> actual migration by hand in the initial phase.
Right now as far as rolling goes, there's me and Lucas Nussbaum. Others
have expressed interest in it too, including Stefano Zacchiroli and Asheesh
Laroia.
For the snapshot side, so far Anthony Towns and Joey Hess have been the
most active in drafting the implementation plan.
Reference:
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/cut-team/2010-September/000152.html
> That's important because from it will come the necessary buy-in from
> developers — or not. If you, Raphaël, start providing new
> Release/Packages/Sources that you compute from the ones in sid or
> testing, that's all fine and dandy, and we get a rolling thing. But
> it's not official, and it's not supported, and it's not “safely used”.
> If the release team does it (possibly with you as part of it), with
> sufficient buy-in from the developers, then we have something worth
> something.
As long as we define the "release team" the team responsible of
releasing our next stable release, I don't see why I must be part
of it to start rolling. That said I fully expect lots of cooperation
between RT members and "rolling team" members and I surely hope that
they do not stay disjoint for very long.
As far as buy-in from developers goes, yes it's needed in general. But
we do already have testing that is supposed to be in relatively good
state at any time and nobody has complained about this principle as far as
I know. So I'm not convinced we need anything else to be able to advertise
rolling as a testing-like distribution for end-users.
Read this message of Stefano on the topic of a poll:
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/cut-team/2010-September/000085.html
What are your suggestions to ensure we have enough buy-in?
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer ◈ [Flattr=20693]
Follow my Debian News ▶ http://RaphaelHertzog.com (English)
▶ http://RaphaelHertzog.fr (Français)
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