Re: Bits from the Release Team - Kicking off Wheezy
Hi,
thank you all for your feedback!
On Thu, 28 Apr 2011, Mehdi Dogguy wrote:
> > So your "testing" is essentially the pre-2000 "frozen" distribution [1], and
> > your "rolling" is basically the current "testing" without the need to freeze?
> > If that's the case, calling the distributions unstable/testing/frozen/stable
> > might make everyone less confused :-)
>
> uh… thanks! that's more clear, indeed.
Good. I just want to point out that "frozen" built on top on rolling
(which is what we're proposing here) is different from "frozen" built on
top of unstable (which is what we had before the introduction of testing).
On Thu, 28 Apr 2011, Mehdi Dogguy wrote:
> > Might be, except that I don't want to keep the name "testing" due
> > to its connotation that doesn't reflect well the goal of something
> > that's constantly usable.
>
> Except that it's lying to our users to name it "rolling" because packages
> from rolling won't be rc-bug free. For this reason, I think that "testing"
> is a very well choosen name, more honest about its state.
Well, stable is not free of RC bugs either. Rolling means that it changes
often, not that it is free of bugs. I don't think we'd be lying, instead we
would more cleary express our (new) intent.
> If people think that "testing" (as a suite) is broken, then we should
> try to change that idea, instead of just changing its name. (IMO)
I don't plan to "just change its name". But it's the starting point
because it expresses that Debian would like to officially support usage of
testing/rolling.
Can we go forwards step by step? :-)
On Thu, 28 Apr 2011, Philipp Kern wrote:
> On 2011-04-28, Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org> wrote:
> > Might be, except that I don't want to keep the name "testing" due
> > to its connotation that doesn't reflect well the goal of something
> > that's constantly usable.
>
> Oh it is mostly constantly usable. Yes, sometimes an arch has to suffer but I
> don't think it would be any easier in a "rolling" suite given that the
> procedures won't really be changed.
I know this. That's why I believe we could just add a symlink once we
agree that we'd like to officially support testing/rolling.
We just need to be clear that it's on a best-effort basis and that if
there are conflicts between supporting stable and supporting rolling,
stable will have the priority.
> People aren't complaining that testing isn't usable but that it isn't
> current enough. At least that's how I saw the complaints at the CUT
> BOF.
Right. But there are several ways to improve this. I want to discuss
those, but not now. It's completely orthogonal to the decision of whether
we want to officially support a never-freezing testing/rolling.
> (And indeed it's about getting the old frozen back and uploading there
> directly. And regarding your "I'd help with transitions", we'd also need
> people who do the uploads to release p-u together with casing the builds for
> it.)
Well, uploads to "frozen" are the realm of the maintainers. Before the
introduction of testing, it was common to upload to both distributions
(frozen and unstable). This is no longer possible for many good reasons
but we should certainly develop new tools to make it easier for
maintainers to achieve the same result (and still have different version
numbers in testing and unstable due to the different build environment).
For example a script that takes a source package and generate
another source package with the same content except a supplementary
changelog entry with another version and targetting another distribution
(this could be a valid usage of source only uploads provided that
the original source package has been built & tested, and provided that
the build-depends are satisfiable in the target distribution).
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer
Follow my Debian News ▶ http://RaphaelHertzog.com (English)
▶ http://RaphaelHertzog.fr (Français)
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