Hi Branden, In your posting about the 4.3 upload you said you welcomed feedback so I thought I'd drop in my 2 cents from the perspective of an outsider that is contemplating installing Debian in the near future.
It was my understanding that the way Sid-Testing-Stable can work, is to visualize it as a coffee filter. Stable is the perfect cup of coffee. Testing is drinkable. Sid is the promise of great coffee. Experimental is your hot water and grounds. So it is my perception that what Daniel did, was start an upload to Sid, where it would have stayed, until it built successfully on all architectures, until such a time as it percolated down to testing and so on. So it would seem to me that it would just sit there in Sid in a form that would be easily installed by people that track sid, and as patches and changes continue to occur they can simply apt-get the updates and eventually revisions would percolate down to testing and so forth. I know you probably are a perfectionist, so I understand the desire to whip off the sheet and say 'voila', but in the big picture of things it doesn't seem to me as if he did something really terrible as it probably would work fine by now, on the eve of 4.4's release. Maybe a compromise between a continuous flow and a magician's sheet release, would be to issue quarterly drops to sid. If I don't understand the relevant technical or political issues at hand, I apologize. Regards, Peter.