On Sat, Mar 04, 2006 at 01:02:20PM +0100, Marc 'HE' Brockschmidt wrote: > Though Martin 'Joey' Schulze as stable release manager presents lists of > packages that are accepted into the next stable point release on a > regular basis, they normally are not released "roughly two months after > the last update" (which is the official plan). > > Do you know why this doesn't work as planned? What would you do to > make regular point releases possible? I think the first thing to note is that irregular point releases aren't a big deal -- since they are almost solely security updates that are already available via security.debian.org, and TTBOMK there haven't been any installer updates to either woody or sarge. That means point releases get a fairly low priority when other things are going on, and if those are the only concerns, that's what it *should* mean. It does have a non-technical drawback though, and that's the vitality issue. Having regular updates to stable -- even if they're not that important in and of themselves -- makes a difference to how people see the project, and whether they feel energised in doing extra work of their own; whether that would directly affect the next stable point release, or whether they're just independently inspired. So I think we need more than "because we said we would" as a reason to worry about regular point releases; but I also think promoting that sense of momentum and livliness is such a reason. Anyway, I already partially blogged about what I think will improvement, http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/blog/2005/11/26#2005-11-26-niv2 which is to change the queue structure so that uploads don't enter proposed-updates until approved by the SRM. That allows rejections to happen immediately, rather than only when a point release happens, and reduces the work that has to happen at a point release pretty significantly too. It also allows us to point users at proposed-updates and say "everything you see in there will be part of the next point release, please report any bugs!" which should make for better point releases. I'm aiming to put this in place as part of the next point release, which should be happening fairly soon. Cheers, aj
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