Re: Debian's branches and release model
Hi Simon,
For me, the long freeze are very problematic. They may spawn for 6
months, which is how long it takes for a new OpenStack release to show
up, and then I don't know where to upload it... :/
As a result, the Wallaby release of OpenStack (released last spring)
never had the time to migrate fully to testing, for example, because I
uploaded Xena (released last October).
Anyways, here's my reply inline below...
On 10/18/21 6:54 PM, Simon McVittie wrote:
> It
> also aligns the incentives for enough people to make sure that we can
> successfully make a release in a finite time - even developers who
> don't really care about releases and just want the latest versions
> are incentivized to fix enough things to make the next release happen,
> so that the freeze will end and they can get back to uploading the
> latest versions to unstable.
I don't know how you can make sure that using testing-proposed-updates
instead of unstable would suddenly demotivate everyone that cares about
about next stable. Could you explain?
On 10/18/21 6:54 PM, Simon McVittie wrote:
> However, the problem with freezing testing but not freezing unstable is
> that if you do that, all updates to testing during the freeze (to fix the
> release-critical bugs that stop it from already being ready for release)
> have to go into testing via testing-proposed-updates, which approximately
> nobody uses.
We don't use it, because we're told to use unstable...
If we were told that it's ok to upload changes to unstable during the
freeze, and upload to testing-proposed-updates, we'd do it (and IMO,
it'd be a very good move from the release team).
> Having code changes for our next stable release be essentially untested
> is not great from a QA perspective - if nobody is trying out those new
> versions except for their maintainer, then nobody can find and report the
> (potentially serious) bugs that only happen in system configurations that
> differ from the maintainer's system. That's why the release team strongly
> discourages packages going into testing via testing-proposed-updates, and
> encourages packages going into testing via unstable.
If we were, during the freeze, directed to upload fixes to
testing-proposed-updates, then there would be more people adding it to
their sources.list during the freeze.
Cheers,
Thomas Goirand (zigo)
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