Re: Bits from the Release Team - Kicking off Wheezy
On Mon, May 02, 2011 at 12:10:42AM +0200, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> On 01/05/11 at 23:46 +0200, Pierre Habouzit wrote:
> > > Benefits for Debian:
> > > - attract users who think that testing is only a development branch, and
> > > want newer software than what one finds in stable. Those users are
> > > likely to be rather advanced users (developers, free software
> > > contributors), thus interesting to work with. Some of them could
> > > become Debian contributors. And even if they don't, more users of
> > > testing/rolling means more testers of the next stable release
> > > [remember how the bug reporting rate of Ubuntu is higher than
> > > Debian's -- some areas of Debian could use more testers].
> >
> >
> > I think those can use unstable,
>
> But unstable is a development branch not targeted at being used by
> 'standard' users.
Well, assuming it's the case, what is missing in order to be usable by
"mere" users?
Also note that testing as is has not enough security support, and read
Carsten very good example of the PAM issues. How would CUT or rolling
address those?
I've used testing in the past, in the sarge era. I had to constantly
install packages from unstable for it to work, and the result was a
nightmare of apt-get installability. I've not used testing since, so
/maybe/ it's better nowadays, I'd very much like to have some feedback
from real and recent testing users if there are any, but if I trust my
past experience, the gap to make testing usable is significant. So maybe
making unstable usable isn't *that* much more significant, and is
definitely more compatible with our current workflow.
> > and if they use rolling, I think I
> > already "proved" or at least explained why those don't contribute to the
> > stable in being, but rather the N+1 one.
>
> I think that you are mixing two things here:
> 1) whether we want to turn testing into a rolling release
> 2) what do do with the 'rolling' suite during freeze (fork a 'frozen'
> branch at the beginning of the freeze ? freeze rolling ? start by
> freezing rolling, then after a few months, fork 'frozen' and unfreeze
> 'rolling'?)
I don't mix things. (1) is: no we don't want to turn testing into
rolling because you need to freeze to release. If rolling appears it
must be a second suite. So yes (2) is a question. But frankly, if the
answer of (2) is we don't do rolling during freezes I don't understand
the point of the whole discussion, so I assumed that the answer was "yes
we do rolling all the time".
Actually, the more I read, I think that:
- nobody knows why we want rolling or CUT (though I've read cut.d.net
since, and to me it looks like a glorified snapshot of testing + d-i
+ cd images + all that makes a stable, which basically is just
fine by me);
- nobody knows what rolling *exactly* is, what the plan is. We know
the hype and that "Debian would very much like to support it", but
what's the formal definition, what does it encompass, what does it
mean, what's the recommended implementation?
> > > - give back to the free software world by providing a platform where new
> > > upstream releases would quickly be available to users. Since users
> > > would be able to test new upstream releases earlier, they would be
> > > able to provide feedback to upstream devs earlier, contributing to a
> > > shorter feedback loop.
> >
> > Why doesn't unstable fit that?
>
> Because unstable is a development branch not targeted at being used by
> 'standard' users.
Testing is a release tool not targeted at being used at all. So to me
testing and unstable are both more or less at the same point, with
unstable having the clear advantaged to be targeted at _some_ users. Why
is that so much easier to make testing usable with respect to making
unstable audience broader?
--
·O· Pierre Habouzit
··O madcoder@debian.org
OOO http://www.madism.org
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