Re: my thoughts on the Vancouver Prospectus

[Matthew Garrett <mgarrett@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org> wrote:

> - While neither of the above concerns is overriding on its own (the
>   ftpmasters have obviously allowed these ports to persist on
>   ftp-master.debian.org, and they will be released with sarge), there is a
>   general feeling that twelve architectures is too many to try to keep in
>   sync for a release without resulting in severe schedule slippage.
>   Pre-sarge, I don't think it's possible to quantify "slippage that's
>   preventible by having more active porter teams" vs. "slippage that's
>   due to unavoidable overhead"; but if we do need to reduce our count of
>   release archs, and I believe we do, then all other things being equal, we
>   should take issues like the above into consideration.

This, uh, sounds very much like "We need to drop architectures, and so
we have come up with these criteria that will result in us dropping
architectures". Which is a reasonable standpoint to take, but which also
seems to imply that if 12 architectures manage to fulfil all the
criteria, we'll need to come up with some new criteria to ensure that
the number drops below 12 again. 

If this is the case, I think that needs to be made clearer to avoid
situations where people work to meet the criteria but are vetoed by the
release team because there are already too many architectures. I'm not
massively keen on this - it ends up sounding a bit too much like dead
man's shoes.
 
-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59-chiark.mail.debian.devel@srcf.ucam.org