Re: Debian development and release: always releasable (essay)
On Thu, May 09, 2013 at 08:49:51PM +0100, Lars Wirzenius wrote:
>
> Releases are important
> ----------------------
>
> Releases are important to many, perhaps most, of our users. Hackers
> and hardcore powerusers don't necessarily care about them, of course,
> but most others do. A released version of Debian implies that the
> operating system works: there's a working installer, for example.
> It also implies that all the packages are expected to work together:
> there's no transitions going on, for example, that might break
> dependencies or reverse dependencies.
One thing I'm wondering about, and you don't seem to talk about is
what versions end up in a release.
Some upstreams have a testing branch of there software and a
release branch. It's sometimes useful to have people test the
version in from the testing branch, and having it available in
Debian makes it easier for people to test it.
The question is, to what do I upload it? If I just upload this
to experimental, I'm not going to get any real users, only people
who really want to use this newer version for whatever reason.
But it's sometimes more interesting to have a wider audience use
it. This of course depends on how stable the version really is.
So what people now do is upload this to unstable, and even let it
migrate to testing. But it might not be diserable to actually
have this unreleased version in a Debian release. It might have
bugs that aren't RC, and you might be better of with the previous
release.
Do you have a suggestion on how to deal with that?
Kurt
Reply to: