Re: Question for all candidates: Release process
On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 12:56 AM, Gunnar Wolf <gwolf@gwolf.org> wrote:
> Hmm, you got me thinking here on why this happened, as I share your
> impression. Maybe it was because the project as a whole put more care
> into the release process after the massive pain it was to release
> Sarge, a three-year-long pain we didn't want to suffer again? For
> Lenny we lost some of that push, although the release process was
> still mostly swift, with a minor slip regarding what we expected.
As has been said by others, I don't think this is accurate. It might
have been one of the reasons, but there are probably many others. For
example, the competition of dunk-tank vs dunc-bank, made Etch one of
the best Debian releases because it REALLY had very very few bugs. In
other releases, there might have been no RC bugs reported, but the
bugs were there anyway.
Another thing that I see "special" about Etch, is that Steve and
Andreas stayed as managers after Sarge was released, so they came to
Etch with a lot of knowledge on their shoulders. After that, it has
been sadly very hard for us to keep the RMs for long enough.
And there are probably a lot of other factors to take into account of
Etch's success.
> As for the reasons why we are not freezing yet... I think it is
> somewhat a lack of commitment to what the Release Team says, as (too)
> many people felt betrayed with the way the freeze-related
> announcements were made (a topic that has already been analized
> here).
I don't agree here. I think that the lack of commitment to the
release is more probably due to lack of enough communication from the
Release Team and lack of motivation from the general developer body.
This is not intended as criticism towards what the RT has done, but
it's more of a diagnose: we are lacking motivation and more
communication of near-future goals could help us work better as a
group.
Personally, even though I was shocked in July by the unexpected
announcement, I was very glad to see the Release Team find a
compromise solution, that fit the project's time better, and thus in
no way do I feel "betrayed". I don't think the majority of developers
does.
I think that the lack of manpower is a much bigger factor. As has
been said, here and elsewhere, we are lacking people on this area as
much as on many other areas in Debian, and that shows.
> So, going back to the questioning of the candidates: Do you agree with
> this very simplistic analysis? If so, how would you push to get the
> drive and the confidence back?
As said, I don't agree.
What I plan to do as DPL that would help in this area, is set some
project-wide goals, so that developers can be inspired to focus their
energies on those goals, and also several initiatives to get more
people to help Debian, both by reporting and by fixing bugs.
--
Besos,
Marga
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