On 01/05/11 at 20:55 +0200, Pierre Habouzit wrote: > On Sun, May 01, 2011 at 08:02:51PM +0200, Lucas Nussbaum wrote: > > On 01/05/11 at 18:38 +0200, Pierre Habouzit wrote: > > > You're saying: > > > > > > Problem: > > > I acknowledge that people are not interested in stable releases > > > enough and that the RT has to compensate all the time. > > > > Those two statements are true: > > - A subset of DDs care about doing stable releases. The rest of DDs > > don't care. > > - A subset of DDs care about doing 'rolling'. The rest of DDs don't > > care. > > > > The release team obviously cares about stable releases, and I mostly > > read the individual positions of RT members in this thread as "if we do > > 'rolling', it will be harder to do stable releases." Their position is > > completely understandable. It's likely that doing 'rolling' will impact > > stable releases in some ways. Some of the impact might be negative, some > > might be positive. > > > > But what we (the project) need to decide on is where we want to go. > > After all, we could decide not to do stable releases, or to do them > > every six months instead of every two years. The current choice of > > doing stable releases every two years is there only because a large > > subset of DDs care about doing that. > > The thing is, I think that rolling and testing are not compatible. So > it seems unlikely to me that we can support both in Debian, especially > not in the same namespace "testing" or "rolling". > > I don't want to lose stable releases, it's a disservice to our users. > And if you try something like your plan B, you'll have two issues: > > (1) you'll split the userbase, some of the users will use rolling > instead of testing, and during the freeze we're very interested > about our users to test testing. It's actually the period where it > matters the most. > > In the end you get less testing coverage, hence mathematically > lessen the quality. > > (2) developers who already care little about stable releases will even > care less because they will be able to do the work that they like > (brining their software up to date, not really caring about stable), > IOW it'll divert attention of the maintainers even more. > > Both will lead to a poorer quality of the stable release, and probably > even longer freezes. Both are a disservice to the stable release, and to > our users. And in the end both will put more pressure on the shoulders > of the RT members that already don't scale.
The problems of Plan B have already been well explained in this thread. And both (1) and (2) are (at least partially) addressed by Plans A and C. > Of course rolling has some appeal, but it's just hype, and well, > sometimes our users want silly things and we should know better than to > indulge them. > > I agree that a 6 months freeze sucks because we miss a release for many > upstreams (gnome, KDE, …), which makes packaging harder. But maybe we > should focus on how to reduce the freeze period (which would in turn > mean that we should have some study about why it's 6-months long instead > of 3 like I'm sure it could be). > > > I strongly believe that lessening the quality of the Debian stable > release is harming Debian as a whole. > > And I know I'm rehashing things, but this will inevitably lead to more > work for maintainers: supporting stable + testing means more work there > is no way it will reduce the work. It's our scarce resource > (developpers), so why don't we *first* focus on making packaging easier, > leaner, simpler, and *then* see what we can do with all that new free > time we just bought? We have been trying to do stable releases while making packaging easier for years now. If I follow your argument, why don't we stop making stable releases for a while, and focus on making packaging easier? [ Note that my position is based on the assumption that we have a share of DDs interested in rolling similar to the share of DDs interested in stable releases. Unfortunately, it's very difficult to know where we stand regarding this. ] - Lucas -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20110501193507.ga31...@xanadu.blop.info