Re: Bits from the Release Team - Kicking off Wheezy

[Mehdi Dogguy <mehdi@debian.org>]

On 28/04/2011 11:29, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> On Wed, 27 Apr 2011, Mehdi Dogguy wrote:
>> For example: What would be Rolling's content right after a release? 
>> (comparing to testing, which starts from the stable just released). 
>> I
> 
> Rolling doesn't magically change after a release. It's still the result
> of the migration of packages from unstable into it.
> 
> I said in my blog post[1] that testing is "branched-off from rolling". 
> This means: - rolling is the long-lasting distribution where packages 
> migrate from unstable - at freeze time, instead of freezing rolling, we
> make a snapshot of rolling (I call it testing) and this is where we do
> the work left to make it ready for release - testing is really a 
> temporary distribution that has a purpose only during freeze, if you 
> use "testing" when there's no freeze you're just using "stable" because
> the testing symlink is still pointing to the distribution that has been
> released now
> 

Thanks! This made it clear to me. So, aiui, this is different from the
initial plan. CUT folks said that testing has some problems such as
removal of pacakges. They wanted to do regular snapshots of testing, etc…
But, aiui, this new "rolling" plan has nothing to do with the original
proposal. And, it doesn't solve the problem of removals (well, or only
during a freeze).

So, the workflows (old and new) can be described as follows:

(Note that I use "testing" and "frozen" in the table below to not add
confusion and to make clear what will be new, and what already exists and
works… If we want to change names, okay, but let's describe the process
with what we have *now*.).


       |   before    |   during         |  release
       |   freeze    |   freeze         |   day+1
       | dev period  |                  |
———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
       |    sid      |    sid           |    sid
before |  testing    | testing (frozen) |  testing==stable
       |  stable     |   stable         |   stable
———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
       |    sid      |     sid          |    sid
after  |  testing    |   testing        |  testing
       |   stable    |    frozen        |  frozen (new stable now)
       |             |    stable        |  oldstable
———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

Is this what you have in mind? (just checking since I think that I didn't
get it right yet, sorry!). How's rolling different from testing? (except
that testing freezes from time to time… yes, I know, that's the main point
of the proposal, but still, I want to know if there are other changes).

Regards,

-- 
Mehdi Dogguy مهدي الدڤي
mehdi@{dogguy.org,debian.org}