Hi, No, not quoting a bit. And answering to the top of the thread. Over a week old, also. And even more, not having read a majority of the replies. Still. Mark, I think you are personally among the best positioned people to be heard on this topic - And your goal is quite worthy. However, I think pushing the distributions to freeze semi-coordinatedly (as much coordinatedly as possible) is not the best way. As you have witnessed with Debian, some people will grill you at full flame. RH didn't pay much attention. I'd suggest you to try approaching from the other side, although it will surely prove a very hard path as well: If we say now, «All distributions should freeze in December», many groups in each will cry because it breaks their plans. Because their upstreams are working full-steam (and are either at the most unstable point in their release cycle or because they are in mid-freeze). I have been bitten by this before (i.e. by the not-precisely-2.0 mod_perl that was shipped in Sarge, breaking source compatibility with any other mod_perl in the face of Earth, which in turn made me miserable when having a development machine running Sid), and will quite probably be bitten again (i.e. the Ruby interpreter crew worked on and announced how their upstream version management scheme will be handled, and we will probably soon have to rush on a binary package recreation/renaming frenzy soon). Some things will/would be probably left out (i.e. the "officially useful" Perl 6.0 release). Anyway - I think that a key for having distributions agree to a coordinated freeze is to have upstream development also feel and adhere to this cadence. If upstreams try to stabilize towards mid-even-years (i.e. July 2009, July 2011, …), we distributors will have a much easier time integrating them. And your idea will have a much better shot at being accepted. Of course, many upstreams will not accept this, as it breaks their workflow and might just feel outside influence from people they don't care too much about (and I'm not meaning the Linux desktops, as they obviously care about Linux distributions, but mainly OS-agnostic projects). Still, I think it would be worth a try. Greetings, -- Gunnar Wolf • gwolf@gwolf.org • (+52-55)5623-0154 / 1451-2244
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