On Sun, May 19, 2002 at 12:40:54PM +0900, Junichi Uekawa wrote: > Try GNU/Hurd. > This is Debian. > Debian is going to be released. > Release time is an "emergency", where people in Debian > are required to be concentrated on releasing something useful. > > Please get a clue.
I was going to ignore the "this is release time" issue, but it has been repeated several times now, so I think it is appropriate to remind that this is the first time a release ever had such an effect on the whole of Debian. I was personally not too much interested in the past Debian releases, but was more interested in developing Debian further, rather than stabilizing it and hammering it together for a release. It was easy for me to do this, because the people working on the release could do so in the "frozen" distribution, and the people working on the next release could do it in the "unstable" distribution. This was not without problems if you had to release a package only for frozen, but anyway, that's how it was done. There was a clear cut where unstable was virtually copied into frozen and that was very much like a branch in CVS. After that, everything in unstable could hardly affect frozen and vice-versa. If you are used to CVS you will know that a branch is very useful to split development (in the release branch, you maintain stability, and in the HEAD branch you continue the unstable development). This is the first release to use the "testing" mechanism with propagation of individual packages from "unstable" to "testing". According to aj this made his job easier, but it is not without problems either. The old problem of releasing a package only for one branch still seems to have been worsened. I have heard that people don't upload new versions of packages into unstable in case the testing version needs a bug fix, so it seems that uploading only for testing seems to be quite hard. I was even discouraged to file bugs that were not critical for the woody release because maintainers could misunderstood this as a request to upload a fixed package to unstable, which then would be propagated to testing (destabilizing it) or stick in unstable and prevent future updates to the version in testing in case a release critical bug appeared. This is how I understood it, and I am sorry if I got some detail wrong. When the release comes nearer, there are less and less people able to help with it, because the problems become more and more localised to some selected individuals. For example, I can not help with setting up an rbuilder for security updates. I guess several hundred people in Debian are with me on this. This is probably not the very only thing to do, but you get the idea. Maybe this is a point where the release process can be improved, to allow, as it used to be before, a more asynchronous development process, which allows everyone to go at the speed they can rather than to force everybody to go at the same speed. See also the brief subthread starting at http://lists.debian.org/debian-policy/2002/debian-policy-200205/msg00095.html Thanks, Marcus -- `Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] Marcus Brinkmann GNU http://www.gnu.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
