On Sun, May 01, 2011 at 11:39:47PM +0200, Lucas Nussbaum wrote: > On 01/05/11 at 22:48 +0200, Pierre Habouzit wrote: > > On Sun, May 01, 2011 at 10:36:07PM +0200, Lucas Nussbaum wrote: > > > It's clear that we are not going to stop doing stable releases anytime > > > soon. However, there seem to be some interest in the "rolling release" > > > concept. The question is: can we (Debian) provide a rolling release > > > with an acceptable increase in workload, and without compromizing the > > > quality of our stable releases ? If yes, why shouldn't we do it? > > > > Well, if you hadn't guess, I think it will increase workload > > I agree. The question is: will the increase of workload be worth it? > > > and worse divert attention from what I think is a more important goal. > > Your point is basically "we should discourage developers to do something > else than working on getting the next stable release out". I don't buy > it. I'm sure that we are all very good at procrastinating the things > that we don't want to do, whether the "excuses" are provided by Debian > or by other projects/hobbies. > > Developers who are not interested in helping with the release will just > do something else. We can send a clear message to developers that > getting the stable release out should be considered more important than > working on rolling or on one's other pet projects, but besides that, I > don't think that there's much more to do.
No I say we're already not that good for Stable releases, why would we chose to be even worse. Would releasing be just a breeze my discourse would be very different. I think we're not that good at releasing that we can sustain rolling. 6 months of freeze is just too long. > > But really what I'd like to see is numbers and compelling reasons to > > start all that CUT/rolling thing, because that's missing completely from > > the thread, I'm still not understanding why we need anything like that. > > You don't do something like that because it's hype, you do it because > > it's badly needed, and well, why? > > There's a clear user demand for rolling releases. For evidence, one can > look at the usage of Debian testing or unstable which clearly goes > further than the DD community. Or at the quickly growing market share of > ArchLinux. Or at the interest in LinuxMint and Aptosid. > > Personally, I'm surrounded by [advanced] Ubuntu users who would be > interested in something *slightly* harder to use, with more recent > software. > > I think that Debian is in a perfect position to provide a rolling > release with marginal additional work, since we already have testing to > build on. > > Benefits for Debian: > - attract users who think that testing is only a development branch, and > want newer software than what one finds in stable. Those users are > likely to be rather advanced users (developers, free software > contributors), thus interesting to work with. Some of them could > become Debian contributors. And even if they don't, more users of > testing/rolling means more testers of the next stable release > [remember how the bug reporting rate of Ubuntu is higher than > Debian's -- some areas of Debian could use more testers]. I think those can use unstable, and if they use rolling, I think I already "proved" or at least explained why those don't contribute to the stable in being, but rather the N+1 one. Which is probably not bad, but not the most urgent thing. > - give back to the free software world by providing a platform where new > upstream releases would quickly be available to users. Since users > would be able to test new upstream releases earlier, they would be > able to provide feedback to upstream devs earlier, contributing to a > shorter feedback loop. Why doesn't unstable fit that? > - get back some attention that is currently taken away from Debian by > derivatives. This is important to carry our /political/ messages, > which are not necessarily carried out by our derivatives. *I* (but that's personal) don't care about that. I don't find that a compelling argument. -- ·O· Pierre Habouzit ··O madco...@debian.org OOO http://www.madism.org -- 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/20110501214614.gi20...@madism.org