What about making release candidates of Skolelinux sarge?
Before releasing Skolelinux 1.0 Venus we made 47 prereleases and 3
release candidates. We started with the woody-based developer branch
in June 2001. Today this work is manly sarge based. But it's a
difference in how the testing and releasing is done that could be
improved.
* What am I asking for?
I am an highly skilled system developer that are able to file bugs,
and do much testing of the daily builds and prereleases. I know of a
whole lot of teachers and maintainers of small and huge
Skolelinux-installations that has made a test bench for testing the
new versions of Skolelinux. I can't set them to work with testing the
sarge version of Skolelinux because I don't know where to start, or
which CD that should be tested. It's no report that shows the work in
progress, and to collect the bugfixes in bugzilla is to
complicated. The result is that a lot of hands and heads walking
around unemployed with "to much" spare time. They have the equipment,
and just waiting to help. So where are the release notes and the
prereleases? Then we could organise the people that are interested to
give us a hand. This is contributors that are not so familiar with the
daily-build and the track of the date and hours, to test prereleases
and give the developer and bug-tracking system feedback. This is the
people that loves that Skolelinux is as simple as possible.
* Some reasons for this
Before releasing the Skolelinux 1.0 we followed a periodical
"time-based" release cycle. One or two days before the development
gatherings it was made an ready to test-CD. Around one week after the
gatherings it was made an bug-fixed CD - and the CD was given a
prerelease-number where people could test it. Between the gatherings
there was also releases. It was some obvious advantages doing that.
Teachers and non-debian-developers could easily download the new
prereleased CD and check for repairs. It was easy to file bug-reports,
and there was an announcement of the changes and improvements[1][2]:
[1] http://developer.skolelinux.no/info/cdbygging/news.html
[2]
https://init.linpro.no/pipermail/skolelinux.no/linuxiskolen/2004-June/014795.html
Today, when working with a sarge-based Skolelinux, there is no such
announcement from the persons that work with improving and upgrade the
system. There is a kind of prereleas-CD's from Finn-Arne that divides
a little from the daily builds. The CD works, but there are to few
person who tests it and give feedback. The daily build is to make it
easy to check out bug-fixes and so on for the hard core
testers. But even them get confused because of the lack of
announcement. When people who testing the system tries to find out
which "daily build"[3][4] or Finn-Arne version they are using for
testing, this tigers of an discussion[5] on the developer-list about
which version the test person has downloaded, and from where.
Unfortunatly this is an hindrance for contributing to making Skolelinux
better, and to make the next sarge-based version, even if it is
an nice work-around-guide[6] to facilitate testing and upgrades ...
[3] ftp://ftp.skolelinux.no/tmp/faj_sarge/
[4] ftp://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-sarge/
[5] http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2004/12/msg00154.html
[6]
http://developer.skolelinux.no/dokumentasjon/debian-edu_sarge_installation.txt
By Knut Yrvin January 31th 2005
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