Re: Bits from the Release Team - Kicking off Wheezy
On Sun, May 01, 2011 at 08:38:55AM +0200, Mike Hommey wrote:
> On Sun, May 01, 2011 at 01:32:19AM +0200, Pierre Habouzit wrote:
> > FWIW I think that "rolling" or "CUT" miss the point entirely. As a
> > Debian user I use stable on my servers (with a few backports for the 3-4
> > things I need bleeding edge for). For my desktop I use unstable, and
> > when that breaks (which is *very* rare, really) I go to snapshots and go
> > back a few versions. I couldn't care about testing any less. And at
> > work, every person I know either uses just stable or does the same as
> > me. I know no testing user around me. Of course I'm not pretending I
> > know the absolute Truth, but well, I find this whole "users want testing
> > badly" thing dubious.
>
> The real problem is not "users want testing badly", but "Debian wants
> people to use testing badly". Because what Debian releases is testing.
> If nobody uses it, we don't know until it becomes stable that it's
> broken in some subtle ways because it's not exactly what everyone else
> using unstable is using.
>
> So while I do agree with the rest of your message, I do see a need to
> make testing more attractive so that we have a solid user base actually
> testing what we are going to release, and stop saying to people that
> they shouldn't be using testing (and I've seen that said *a lot*).
I know it's not a good excuse, but testing is something that many
distributions have not. They have alphas, betas, pre-releases of many
sorts, but testing is very specific to Debian, and it does receive
attention. We would like more, sure, but I don't think we want to
support testing either. I think we'd like people running unstable stick
with testing when we freeze, that makes sense, yes.
And FWIW, I use to migrate my servers to testing during the freeze (I
did that for lenny and for squeeze), because the update flow is way
slower than for the 18 other months. And I'm pretty sure others do it.
Do we care about people "testing" being throughly tested all the time?
I'm not really that sure, it's a volatile target and it makes no sense
to fix software version incompatibility bugs that ends up never really
exist in the release nor in unstable for more than a few days e.g. It's
more work for a very doubtful quality gain.
So instead of rolling, I'd find a way to expose testing a lot more while
it counts for us, yes, and while we do care about testing being usable,
meaning, the damn freeze!
--
·O· Pierre Habouzit
··O madcoder@debian.org
OOO http://www.madism.org
Reply to: