Re: Tentative Proposal: Regarding experimental use

[Chris Lawrence <cnlawren@olemiss.edu>]

On Jun 09, Franklin Belew wrote:
> This is a proposal to reduce the number of bugs on the main archive and
> to allow for a cleaner transition on package maintainership and version
> control.
> 
> 1> All completely new packages are required to go into experimental for no
>    less than 30 days as a trial period.
> 
> 2> All new maintainers must put their packages into experimental for no 
>    less than 30 days as a trial period.
> 
> 3> All packages which change maintainers will be put into experimental
>    for a 30 day trial period
[...]

I'm not really sure this idea will work, unless a lot of people track
experimental (which is strongly discouraged... to the point people
have been told not to point an apt sources.list at experiemental).  As
the saying goes, "with many eyes, all bugs are shallow."  Corrollary:
without any eyes, nobody will ever see the bugs.  So all this proposal
would do is delay fixing bugs by 30 days (since nobody'd see the buggy
package until it arrived in the real archive).

Also, implementing the infrastructure for this proposal would take us
9/10 of the way to implementing package pools (and, in any event, the
pools from what I've heard are just waiting on potato to release so we
don't mess with the archive while it's frozen).


Chris