On Wed, 5 Aug 2009 10:26:07 -0300, Marga wrote: > This has been one of the main concerns of the December freeze, apart > from the fact that we wouldn't meet our release goals, that you are > suggesting how to solve. Ubuntu has shown in the past a tendency to > ship with the latest versions of software. In the case of GNOME, the > freeze in Ubuntu usually happens before GNOME is even released, and > yet the latest GNOME goes into the release. > > It is my opinion that freezing after GNOME releases (and gets into > testing) would be better for Debian. This means either April or > October, depending on which GNOME release we want to ship.
I think that this point truly deserves to be discussed for a number of reasons. Personally, I think that releasing a new distribution right after GNOME or KDE has produced a new major version is an extremely bad idea, because the X.XX.0 release of anything tends to have too many rough edges (feature regressions, out of sync translations, etc.) that usually need further polishing via X.XX.1 and X.XX.2 releases before a new major desktop release becomes truly usable by non-technical people i.e. not requiring any workaround for some stupid regression that gets fixed later in point releases, much after the initial distribution release has started shipping with X.XX.0. As such, I'd prefer if whatever common freeze for core packages that is agreed between Debian and its derivatives (Ubuntu and others) only happened after the next X.XX.2 versions of GNOME and KDE have been released. This will of course require GNOME and KDE to sync their clocks as well and my understanding is that recent Guadecs and aKademies have seen the two communities visiting each other and working towards this goal, which is very good news indeed. Some people might also find ensuring that XFCE and LXDE are also kept in the loop is desirable too and, if that's the case, it would be desirable to help them achieve this goal as well. I think that the fact we're having this discussion and are taking concrete actions towards achieving cadence is a step in the right direction. I'd however humbly hope that distributions would be as willing to accommodate upstream cycles as they hope to see upstream accommodate distribution cycles. Both sides will have to give some slack and agree to shift their release cycles by a couple of months and meet half-way, for this cadencing idea to work. One simply cannot expect upstream to magically jump just because one or two major distributions reached a consensus. The same way that Mark suggested Ubuntu lending resources to help Debian reach the target freeze on time, resources will need to be lent to upstream to reach the same target date on time. Best Regards, Martin-Éric -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org