Re: R 3.0.0 and required rebuilds of all reverse Depends: of R

[Tollef Fog Heen <tfheen@err.no>]

]] Russ Allbery 

> > and this doesn't prevent developers from fixing RC bugs.
> 
> Nothing prevents developers from fixing RC bugs at any time.  They just
> don't in sufficient numbers to keep ahead of the incoming rate except
> during a freeze, both because the freeze drops the incoming rate (by,
> among other things, rejecting new transitions) and because more people
> actually work on RC bugs during a freeze.

Just to expand slightly on this, the problem you're both poking at is
that during a freeze, our incentives are directed towards fixing RC bugs
(because then we can release, which means we can then do what we prefer
to, which (as you can see in the unconstrained periods), is to package
new software, new upstream versions and so on).  New code tends to be
buggier than older, debugged code, so it's no surprise that we get more
RC bugs in the non-freeze periods..

-- 
Tollef Fog Heen
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are