Re: Running testing? -- read this.
On Wed, Jun 4, 2008 at 9:11 AM, Chris Bannister
<mockingbird@earthlight.co.nz> wrote:
> ----- Forwarded message from Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> -----
>
> User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/23.0.60 (gnu/linux) (x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu)
> From: Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org>
> Date: Tue, 03 Jun 2008 12:14:03 -0500
> To: debian-devel@lists.debian.org
> Subject: Re: Bug#484129: release.debian.org: packages in tasks should be fixed in priority and removed in last resort after
> discussion
>
> On Tue, 3 Jun 2008 12:05:45 -0400, Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> said:
>
>> Manoj Srivastava wrote:
>>> I thought I had answered that. The only version that th project
>>> releases for end users is stable.
>
>> Debian has been releasing versions of testing for end users for years.
>
> This is perhaps a matter of semantics.
>
> Where I come from, when you are testing something, it is not
> "released". Releases, in my view, have release numbers, so people can
> refer to them in bugs and recommend to other folks; our testing is
> volatile, and changes at least daily. I do agree that microsoft has
> blurred issue, but releasing things early to paying consumers to test,
> but hey.
>
> We call it testing for a reason: it is a a branch for testing
> what our next release will be. Do we try to keep it as close to a
> viable release as we can? Sure. Do we try to make it easy for people to
> test? Absolutely. But it would be diseembling to pretend that this
> version is anything but a test version of a product under development,
> and that stuff happens with development versions.
>
> People who run our test versions are part of our community, they
> are helping us test our development packages. We will not make things
> harder for them than they need to be, but they should also not be
> shielded from the fact (and it is a fact) that what they are ending up
> installing is a test version of a product under development.
>
> I also made an assumption: an end user is one who does not care
> to be a early adopter guinea pig; and for people who do not care for
> breakage and do not want to participate in product development and
> testing, the only variant we produce is called the stable release
So? I've been using testing for years, and have found it to be
remarkably stable - it's remarkable precisely because it IS 'testing'.
Sometimes (rarely) things break, but that's something I prefer to
live with so that I can have an up-to-date system. The current
'stable' is relatively up to date, as it's fairly recent, but there
tends to be a long period between stable releases.
Patrick
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