On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 04:52:29PM +0200, Mehdi Dogguy wrote:
> 2) During the freeze, you're killing an important step in the Release
> process which is "the testing". Packages that move from sid to testing are
> tested by a huge user base (sid users), and then double-tested by testing
> users.
I concur this might be a problem. At the same time I also find quite
convincing Lucas' arguments about the fact that with the introduction
(or better advertising, name one) of rolling we are likely to get more
earlier testing---as in "review", not as in the suite name---than with
the current scheme.
To complement that with even more user testing, I think we should
consider advertising specific (late) frozen snapshots as
alpha/beta{1,2,3} development releases. Several other distros are doing
that and I do believe they have good reasons for doing so, which might
apply to us as well. For once, it's undeniable that there is some
"announcement effect" in the world we live in: at each development
release we might hope to get more explicit testing than only relying on
the "you can always test testing and let us know" philosophy.
In the Squeeze release we have done better than before by calling for
explicit upgrade testing (kudos to the Release Team!), but a specific
plan of alpha/beta/... might bring even more testing, especially if the
media help us out with some hype.
This proposal comes with its own drawbacks, as the need of synchronizing
with d-i releases and CD/DVD images, but that might be mitigating by
saying that a specific alpha/beta/ is only for upgrades and not for from
scratch installations. Any other drawbacks of doing development
releases I might have missed?
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Quando anche i santi ti voltano le spalle, | . |. I've fans everywhere
ti resta John Fante -- V. Capossela .......| ..: |.......... -- C. Adams
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