Re: Potato frozen?
On Thu, 1999-10-07 at 20:05:51 -0400, Carl Fink wrote:
> I know that as a matter of policy, Debian doesn't announce release
> dates in advance, but can someone give a *hint*? Is the potato
> release even frozen yet? I mean, I heard that the only problem
> remaining was a Perl tweak months ago, so surely it's getting close to
> done, right?
Apropos your thoughts:
There was a huge debate in August on how to migrate legacy documentation
from /usr/doc to the FHS-mandated /usr/share/doc;
the problem was that some key packages had already been migrated,
while others were evidently a long way away from being ready to migrate,
so the choices were
a) to make some key developers undo some hard work,
b) to wait a long time for all packages to be migrated, or
c) (the final choice) to figure out a way (using symbolic links)
to allow both possibilities on your system while preserving
some semblance of consistency for those who don't want to play
guessing games on where documentation should be found.
(This is my personal, totally unauthorized, interpretation of what happened;
see Debian Weekly News, September 7 and earlier, for a more official view.)
Both the debate and the implementation have surely delayed things.
One good way to track release status, without wading through the >2000 messages
per month on debian-devel, seems to be to follow the mailinglist debian-release.
And then of course Debian Weekly News gives an excellent overview of things.
A relevant statistic is the number of Release-critical Bugs identified
in the Release-critical Bugreports (see debian-devel-announce).
Here are the last four numbers:
09-17 271
09-24 263
10-01 266
10-08 265
In this context, Adam Di Carlo's message on debian-release of 1999-10-08
at 21:43:49 -0400 makes for interesting and somber reading,
as well as giving a good and concise summary of status.
(This is said in an effort not to be critical, but just realistic.}
There may well be a tradeoff between the timely and the bug-free,
as the expected freeze date approaches.
All thoughts above have absolutely NO official status,
and are purely the unexpurgated opinions of the author.
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