Re: just shoot me
On Mon, 19 Oct 1998, George Bonser wrote:
> On Tue, 20 Oct 1998, Nikolai Andreyevich Luzan wrote:
>
> I just wonder .... when a freeze is announced, a lot of people load up
> their systems from unstable to give it a good workout. You might consider
> this a wide but not ubiquitous beta. At this point, now that you have
> several more times more systems in sync with the unstable tree, would it
> make sense for someone ( other than the package maintainer ) to install
> the package and check it out before addig it to the archive? I mean, not
> an extensive feature bugcheck, just a basic integrity check to make sure
> that it does not crash a system when installed.
A freeze is the responsibilty of the committee that oversees the
entire distribution, not that of individual package maintainers. The
fact that a freeze is announce does not mean inherant stability, all
it means is that no new things will be added for that release of the
distribution, the release could be buggy as all hell. The announce of
freeze is analogous to the close acceptance of papers for a conference.
> I think everyone would agree that before a freeze is released, you should
> expect anything to happen if you are in the unstable tree. There is an
> implied level of security when it changes to "frozen" that all the basic
> system crashing bugs have been worked out .... that is why its status was
> changed.
A freeze is not released, it is simply another step towards the release
of a distribution, by the very nature of the unstable tree you should
expect nothing to be perfect in there. And s I have already said
freeze does not imply stability, it simplie states that the only
submissions that will be accepted for inclusion into the tree are
those that fix pre-existing bugs, it also by no means implies that
_any_ bugs have been fixed. The statuse merely changes to frozen to
tell people that release is approaching and that all the bugs are
being fixed.
Nikolai
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