[ Please: can people that follow-up with different questions change the subject accordingly? I believe it would make easier to read the question archive afterwords. ]
On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 08:09:19AM +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote: > During the last debconf, the freeze of squeeze was first announced to > take place in December, then this decision was cancelled, and now we are > in March. > - How do you analyze what happened during last summer? What went wrong? (I don't read minds and I'll just report the impression I got of the event as a DD which has assisted to the talk which created "the case" and which, quite normally, thought about it later on.) I think that the event has been a terribly unfortunate coincidence of bad wording by the release manager and of good will on the side of the press team to anticipate how "the media" would have reported the news. I think Luk meant to propose time-based freeze to the project, but got eventually caught in some frenzy of writing it down properly for the media. A honest, yet unfortunate, mistake. Again, this is just my personal feeling, and I have never asked any of the directly involved people about more details. > - What is your opinion on the motivations for the proposal to freeze in > December? Specifically, in the future, should we try to coordinate our > release process with Ubuntu's? IIRC in the talk the release team discussed how they were approached by Ubuntu people about the possibility of doing a coordinated Squeeze/LTS freeze, to ensure that some core sets of packages were in sync. That would have been given the benefit of coordinating stuff like security fixes, important bug fixes targeted at point release, etc. Back then, it seemed that the only way to have such a guarantee were to freeze at the same time, and "therefore" in December. In general, I'm fine with the idea of coordinating specific releases together with derivative distributions, when both distros will benefit from the coordination. (On a smaller scale, it has already occurred in the OCaml team to coordinate the "stability" of all our source packages with Ubuntu freezes.) What I don't like is the above "therefore". Coordination has to go in both ways, if we want to sync *among* Debian and Ubuntu, we should sit together around a table to decide *when* we freeze; it is not that, since Ubuntu releases every 6 months, we should adapt our release cycle accordingly. If we *can* do that, fine, we will balance pro/cons and decide accordingly. In fact, if we manage to ignore for a bit the unfortunate communication incident, the release team had later on contacted the teams of core set of packages in Debian and, on the basis of their feedback, decided not to freeze in December. Having only the second part without the first would have obviously been better, but we are humans and sh*t happens. > - So, we are now in March. What is your opinion with the release process > so far? When do you see the release happening? As a simple DD, I would be happy to freeze by the end of March / early April and, a bit naively maybe, I would be satisfied about the release process thus far if that will happen. I don't have any direct experience in the release team though, so I'll fully trust the team decision if they will eventually decide to postpone the freeze: they probably see complications that I can't see (such as the actual burden that will be induced by the management of unblock requests). All the above opinions on the release process are expressed as a simple DD. If I get elected DPL, and since I agree that similar questions will be most likely posed in interviews & co, I'll coordinate with the release team a set of answers that best represent their views. Cheers. -- Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7 z...@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/ Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..| . |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie sempre uno zaino ...........| ..: |.... Je dis tu à tous ceux que j'aime
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