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Re: Bits from the Release Team - Kicking off Wheezy



On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 02:21:40PM +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> In general we need to promote the reduction of (potential) bottlenecks
> in Debian rather than the contrary. ... and don't get me wrong: I'm very
> well aware that this specific "bottleneck" is a very good feature to
> have for the preparation of a stable release, given it means more
> scrutiny and ultimately more quality.  But given that "rolling" seems to
> be willing to trade some of that stability off in favor of fresher
> software, it might be warranted to lift it off there.

I think that we should not do any trade off on the quality of
rolling/testing/the-antechamber-of-stable, but instead raise the quality
of unstable so that (which isn't *that* bad, unstable is rarely badly
broken, and I know lots of "stable" releases of linux distributions that
are in worse state than the average of unstable on the same set of
packages…):
  - testing is and remains a release only tool, as the stable staging
    area.
  - unstable becomes more suitable for less experienced users.
  - stuff outside from unstable (experimental nowadays) gets more
    attention.

I've already written one too long mail about that, but allowing DDs to
spin off some repositories in a PPA-way can be the way. Managing a
Debian mirror plus all the {uploading,building,bts}-infrastructure is a
PITA, but if we make it easy, it'll get used. As in VCSes branching
*and* merging "repositories" should be easy. For now we're not even in
the packing CVS era since branching is a PITA. Let's make it easy, and
then the whole rolling thing will be moot because unstable will be good
enough for our users 98% of the time.

[ And also relaxing our NMU policies would help too but that's yet
  another story: in a few words, we should allow NMUs as soon as there
  is enough acked-by for them… to enforce a minimal level of
  peer-review, so that quality is checked, and relax all the conditions
  to perform NMUs at once ]
-- 
·O·  Pierre Habouzit
··O                                                madcoder@debian.org
OOO                                                http://www.madism.org


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