On Sat, Oct 23, 2004 at 03:52:51PM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote: > On Sat, Oct 23, 2004 at 02:33:24PM -0700, Brian Nelson wrote: > > Gergely Nagy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > >> It may sound a bit radical, but core points have been mentioned in the > > >> thread already. I suggest to do it in a more radical way: > > > >> - unstable lockdown in the freeze > > >> - drop Testing and concentrate on work instead of wasting time on > > >> synching stuff. This eliminates the need for testing-security. See > > >> the last part of the paper for details. > > > > Doing this would result in many users who currently run testing fall > > > back to stable + backports or switch to another distro (ubuntu being a > > > likely candidate), which in turn, would result in less bugreports and a > > > less stable distribution. > > > Very few bug reports from testing users are of any value at all. They > > usually either report some transient dependency problem that the > > maintainer can't fix anyway, or report something that has already been > > fixed in the unstable package. > > This seems like a rather unsubstantiated claim. Do you *know* how many of > the good bug reports you've seen come from users of testing vs. unstable?
I don't have any hard data, but I've been tracking debian-bugs-dist for about 2 years now so I think I have a decent feel for it. True, you can't always be sure if the user is using testing or unstable, but it often can be inferred. [...] > Yes, filing bug reports on testing is not often useful (except during a > freeze), but that's not the same as it not being useful to have users > running testing. I didn't claim otherwise. I was just trying to refute the claim that bug reports from testing users were useful. I do question if having testing available to the public throughout the entire release cycle is actually beneficial to the community. There's a common misconception in the community that testing is a "more stable" unstable. Many testing users aren't even aware that testing doesn't have security updates. Probably most of the users of testing should *not* be using it at all. This isn't really related to the proposal in this thread to just drop testing though. -- Blast you and your estrogenical treachery!