Re: The nature of unstable (was: Danger Will Robinson! Danger!)
On Mon, Mar 13, 2000 at 09:08:43AM -0500, Ben Collins wrote:
> > Woody should be running 2.3 or pre-2.4. That should have been among
> > the first things to change.
>
> We are knee deep in a release cycle. We should not be expending our
> resources on woody right now.
speak for yourself. not everyone in debian has your priorities. more to
the point, your priorities are not the only valid ones.
many people can (and ARE!) contribute a lot to woody, without impacting
on frozen in the slightest.
> We should be making potato the best that it can be. Every release
> cycle, peoples obsession with "this new thing" or "that latest beta"
> is what makes the cycle so drawn out. With all of our resources we
> should be able to wipe out every RC bug within a day (or atleast close
> to all of them). The faster we get potato out the door, the sooner we
> can start on those nifty new things to put into woody.
then "fork" the stable release so that those who want to focus on it
exclusively can do so without being distracted by those attracted by the
shiny new toys...and those who want to work on new stuff don't have to
be distracted by the test & freezing cycle. and some people will happily
work on both.
you can't force everyone to work on frozen, trying to do so is not only
highly undesirable it would be completely broken and counter-productive.
volunteers work on what they want, when they want, and they contribute
according to their abilities and their availabile time - many have
nothing that they can contribute to stable or frozen, so they work on
unstable. that is good, that is as it should be.
debian's release cycle persists in being so slow because people persist
in seeing debian's release in the same terms as a commercial operating
system.
the only viable way to speed that up is to implement the package pool
idea, coupled with reasonably frequent "snapshot" releases and less
frequent but fully-tested "stable" releases.
craig
--
craig sanders
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