<snip>This is good.
And no development project can stay in "release mode" all the time, without separate branches for blue-sky/experimental/unstable work. So really, you'd need to split Mandrake development into three branches instead of two: 9.1 upgrades, a mostly-stable "pre-9.2" Cooker, and a like-today's-Cooker "experimental" branch, with solid QA on both of the first two branches. In fact, the first two could share much of the same team: close to a release, both would be working primarily on getting 9.2 ready to go out the door, while shortly after a release, both would be working on figuring out what can be hammered into 9.2 as an update and what has to wait for the future. And this does in fact work for some other projects (including Debian, I believe).
But still, it would require more Mandrake resources, and more user involvement, than the current system. And, while you would probably attract new people to the Cooker effort if it were a more stable system, you'd also find that many of the people who help today would prefer to work on the blue-sky branch.
A compromise might be to do a QA'd sub-release of Cooker every two months, rather than every six months. A single team can work on a project with release dates this short, spending a couple of weeks in freeze every two months. I think most Cooker users would put up with these freezes in exchange for an even-more-usable Cooker. And, more importantly, both Mandrake's team and the user community would have more experience getting together a solid release; it would require less work to tie together two months' worth of development than six; and there'd be a solid way to back-track any subset of the distro, if necessary, without going all the way back to the last major release.
But I'm not sure the system really needs to change. Is it really working that badly? The consensus on this list seems to be that there are major problems with the releases. And, to be honest, people I know who've been using Mandrake for a long time complain that each release is worse than the last. But people I know who've switched from other linux distros, or from Windows, have mostly been happy with the stability of Mandrake 9.0. (True, people who came from MacOS or BSD had lots of complaints, but you can't make those people happy....)
<this is to promote discussions within this community about how the
enormous task of managing a distribution might be made more effective.
I don't think that the kinds of issues discussed in this current thread
are likely to be resolved with the current system, which is likely to
become harder and harder as development gets faster and faster. It will
come to pass that some projects will go through several version changes
in the time it takes to get the iso's out the door. Some projects are almost at
that point now.>
Red light : non-stable/non-functioning - developers and packagers only
Orange light: testing. Will work on increasing majority of machines over an increasingly long time period
Green light: installs and functions on all systems with Green light packages installed.
Within each there could be directories containing binaries for the major architecture flavours, and source.
Storage and bandwidth will eventually become cheap enough to make this feasible.
Or what about some kind of p2p solution? Where xxxx-light machines are networked to and updated from other xxxx-light machines across the net? Checksumming and other tools could be used to address security concerns. Bug reports could be communicated through the same networks, accumulating in number and providing an automated statistical basis for prioritizing developer attention, and directing to developers possessing the right hardware. Using the same p2p networks, developers, bug reporters and users could discuss whatever affects or interests them and coordinate their activities.
Oh, and I think that packages should be revertable on installed systems as well. Users should be protected against unstable software wherever possible, but at the same time they will demand the very latest releases.
What MandrakeSoft and the Cooker community do is extremely impressive. It's the biggest and most complex kind of open source project there is. Peole's imaginations should be hard at work here, exploring how the advantages presented by all those connected with this distro can be leveraged to improve things for the community as a whole. This is free/open source software after all!
Well, that's about it. Apologies if this is of no interest to people - seems that this is a reasonable forum to raise these kinds of issues.
Ciao, Paul.
