About the Hamm Freeze

[Brian White <bcwhite@verisim.com>]

(Please avoid "reply all" on this message -- there are too many recipients.)

I've gotten much mail about this, so I thought I'd just respond to it all
at once.

First off, I'd like to appologize for the misunderstanding about the date.
When I said "it would be frozen on Monday", I meant that the freeze would
be done by Monday.  Apparently many people thought I meant the freeze would
_start_ on Monday (which I can understand).  Next time I'll be more clear.

Because of this, there was a small window where uploads were made expecting
to make it into Hamm before the freeze.  If your package did not make it,
then the easiest thing to do is to reupload it to Incoming with a distribution
of "frozen unstable" on the first line of the "changelog" file.  Also be
sure the changelog states very clearly what has changed.  I'll be trying
to limit changes in Hamm to bug-fixes only.  All critical, grave, and
important bugs _must_ be marked as done before a packages will be allowed
into Hamm.

In addition, the criteria for admission into Hamm will become stricter
as the freeze cycle goes on.  After 2-3 weeks on serious bug fixes will
be allowed.  This is to prevent a large number of package fixes to be
uploaded at the last minutes, thus swamping the testing group right before
release.

Some people think the removal from Hamm was a bad idea, some people think
it was a good idea.  It is my feeling that this "blinding flash of pain"
is much better than a "long and drawn out process".  The removal has
been announced weekly for at least the last 4 weeks, so everybody should
have known what was about to happen.


I made a mistake and removed the following packages:

	quota		xlib6		elvis

These should be part of the distribution.  Since a new upload would have
been necessary anyway (to fix the outstanding bugs), this really is not
a big problem.  It merely means that I must keep track of these packages
manually to make sure an upload is done before release.

The "elvis" package was removed because there are still other versions of
"vi" available".

The "ksmbfs" was removed because it was (as I understand it) superceeded
by another package.

There were numerous packages removed because of "lintian" bugs (eg, no
copyright file, etc.).  While the bugs may not seem important, they really
are trivial to fix and so a priority of "important" was agreed upon.  While
it's true that these bugs were not actually filed until recently, they
were annouced publicly many weeks ago.


If you have any further questions, please send me email.

                                          Brian
                                 ( bcwhite@verisim.com )

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