i have seen a lot of discussion about a distribution half way between stable and unstable. on the surface that sounds like exactly what we need, but at least one person pointed out that this is not the way to manage a project with hundreds of developers working against hundreds of seperate releases cycles. i wish i could remember who said that first, you really hit the nail on the head.
the deadline-based release cycle may work great for commercial projects, but quite possibly not for projects like Debian. i think we need something a little more organic. try this hypothetical release method out: there are two trees. let's call them devel and production. debian saavy folks (maintainers) run devel. new packages are uploaded to devel where they are tested extensivly. when a package has been in devel for more than (for instance) two weeks, and it has no release critical and few important bugs, it graduates into production. the production branch should always work. a system could be put in place where you could always get an iso image of the production branch that is recent to within a few days. i imagine that we would need to get pools in place before we could even attempt this. this type of system could probably work along side of whatever else we decide to to about release cycles. -- (jacob kuntz) [EMAIL PROTECTED],underworld}.net [EMAIL PROTECTED] (megabite systems) "think free speech, not free beer." (gnu foundataion)