The nature of unstable (was: Danger Will Robinson! Danger!)
On Sun, Mar 12, 2000 at 09:53:41PM -0000, Steve Greenland wrote:
> Which is it? Do your friends want the newest bleeding edge stuff, or
> do they want stability? They can't have both at the same time! Oh, I
> see, the want the newest, but they want us to call it "stable".
OK, Here's a question then. If Woody is unstable, which kernel is it
running?
2.2.14
It seems to me that we're ignoring a great advantage of open source
development. People release early and release often. Debian should take
these early releases into the fold as soon as possible. This serves two
perposes.
1. It allows Debian to see exactly what is breaking as soon as possible.
That gives give the maximum amount of time to fix things.
2. Debian starts to act as a test bed for (in this case) kernel development.
Problems encountered can be fed upstream, which in-turn helps the kernel
development.
Woody should be running 2.3 or pre-2.4. That should have been among the first
things to change.
--------------------
On a side note. I'm really not sure that this 'release' stuff works on
debian. Coordinating the development cycles of an infinite number of
packages is impossible. What I would like to see is an unstable tree where
all development is done. As packages reach maturity they 'graduate' to the
stable tree. A snapshot of stable tree at any time works. The unstable tree
just becomes a place for developers to share packages.
The key point is a continually evolving release. As has been said before,
Debian isn't commercial. It doesn't have to behave like it is with releases.
To make this work major changes would have to be coordinated, but there is
no reason that a major Perl change has to impact a major X change. Base
packages like libc become more tricky though.
Paul
--
Paul Sargent
mailto: Paul.Sargent@3Dlabs.com
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