On Sun, Mar 05, 2006 at 03:01:41PM -0500, Joey Hess wrote:
> (Please treat this question as if it were asked on debian-devel not
> here.)
(Not really sure what difference that makes)
> Anthony Towns wrote:
> > I do think it would be interesting for the project to embrace the d-i beta
> > releases and the testing-security support and turn those into regular
> > "mini-releases", without many of the standards we expect of stable,
> > but in a form that's still useful.
> That's been a goal of mine for several years. What more do you feel we
> should do on those beta releases to reach that?
I suspect the only thing that's /necessary/ would be to announce them as
a release rather than a beta -- I'm inclined towards "snapshot release",
but maybe "preview release", or "March 2006 release" or similar would
work too. That is, admit they're not necessarily 100% great, but encourage
users to use them.
Other things that would add to that, imo, would be:
(a) branching the archive or doing other necessary changes to ensure
netinst CDs etc work reliably
(b) security.d.o support against the last preview release, so that
users can upgrade from CD/DVD and only have minimal daily downloads
(c) having it be an equally important part of the project to stable
point releases, including a mail to -announce and similar
I'm not sure if branching the archive's feasible, but it at least becomes
plausible when the mirror split's done shortly; likewise I don't know
how plausible meaningful security.d.o support is, but I think it's worth
a shot. I suspect there are other things people could think up too,
but those are my ideas.
> Another thing we don't do right now is keep the DVDs and larger CDs
> static as released, they continue being updated each week.
I presume that means that they were broken a week or two ago when stuff
was switching over to the current d-i?
> So is it just a matter of terminology, perception, and polish; or do you
> see other major areas where we should improve?
I don't think it's a matter of polish at all (well, with the exception
of things eventually breaking as development continues), mostly one of
changing the perception to be from a "beta" to a "release", and doing
the work necessary to make that perception valid.
Cheers,
aj
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