Re: Why was etch released as stable if it still has bugs?
Allthough the link in Frans Pop's post (
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=229913&cid=18654143
) helps to answer the question. The links referred to
within the links still show release critical bugs,
and, as Pankaj Jangid pointed out in his post I'm sure
these bugs are critical for someone.
By definition I thought release-critical to mean that
it was critical for these bugs to be fixed before the
release can happen. If they are not release-critical
why label them as such. I thought that it was part of
debian's high standards (which make debian the distro
of choice for many) to not release a stable distro if
it had bugs that are considered as serious or grave.
Or what is the REAL definition of release-critical? If
the bugs are not critical for a stable distro to be
released why label them as such (defeats the purpose).
Also, as I mentioned before I have been running Etch
while in testing for quite some time and, for the most
part, it has been quite stable. So I'm not saying that
etch contains bugs that make it unusable. Quite the
contrary - etch is still running quite well in my box.
I'm only pointing out that it doesn't help with user
confidence when a distro releases under the name
stable when it admits to still having several
release-critical bugs at the time. If a distro by it's
own standards says that there are bugs that are
critical to be solved before the release can occur
(hence the definition of release-critical), but then
goes ahead and releases as stable while these bugs
have not been resolved - it makes it seem as though it
has lowered it's standards. If all the
release-critical bugs were reclassified by the package
maintainers as minor or at least less than serious
then it would make more sense to go ahead and release.
But as you can see from:
http://www.debian.org/Bugs/Developer#severities for a
bug to be release critical means that the package is
either critical, grave, or serious. Furthermore, the
same document also states that a package maintainer
can tag the package as etch-ignore meaning "This
release-critical bug is to be ignored for the purposes
of releasing etch" but even this has not been done
which again could suggest that etch was release as
stable in a hurry.
I'm sure new bugs will always come up over time, but
having no known release-critical bugs at the time of a
stable release really shows that when Debian says
stable it really means it.
Why was Sarge able to release at 0 release-critical
bugs and not Etch?
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