In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> you wrote: You know, the whole concept of 'a release' is orthogonal to the way I think about Debian. We've been through that before, too, and I understand the various reasons that it's important for us to "make a release" from time to time... but I doubt any of my machines will ever run "a release". The beauty of the Debian development model in the presence of sufficient network bandwidth is that you don't have to wait until some release happens to get new functionality or bug fixes... The "package pool" concept on some level is just an efficiency hack for managing the master archive site better, but it is also fundamental enabling technology for supporting the idea of having multiple simultaneous "flavors" of Debian.
> this is the workhorse of the package pools/rolling release idea, this is > where there will be the most work to be done, fine-tuning the criteria > (and probably the source of the loudest and longest debates). Absolutely. What I realized after talking to Manoj at some length face-to-face at the Usenix Tech conference in New Orleans a couple of years ago is that we will need to have different "snapshots" (I actually don't like that name) with different criteria. He and I had a fundamental difference of opinion about how automated the package promotion to stability should be. I think we both had reasonable approaches, and there's no reason not to implement both if people want them. The beauty of the package pool concept is that the cost of each "flavor" is pretty low, so there's no reason we can't have a number of them. Some might be different levels of stability towards "a release", some might be proper subsets like Debian Jr. There are a number of secondary issues, like how many versions of each package you can afford to have in the pool before you run out of disk space, but those are all manageable... and we'll learn by doing. I gathered from Guy's email a while back that a prototype might be underway on a Debian machine somewhere. I have spent a bunch of time talking with the other developers at work, one of whom gets paid to do revison control and release management for a living, about this. I believe there are enough interested people willing to work that we *will* have something in place before woody, but I've promised myself that I won't personally do any more work on package pools until potato releases. Bdale