Hello, I'm glad to hear so many people agreeing with the RM's plans and even more glad to see so many things being done to make this seem plausible!
I'm one of those developers who has cvs and other unrealeasable packages in sid. I agree with the comments about moving these to experimental, keeping sid for just releases considered stable, but think changes need to be made to experimental so that people do this by default and so sid will be even more stable: Split experimental into sections: - I don't like having an experimental base system, but would like to try out the latest gnome desktop. experimental-core - new major upstream releases of core packages experimental-gnome - gnome 2.3, galeon2.3, epiphany... experimental-kde experimental-gnome-woody - backport of gnome2 to woody experimental-all - includes all of the above (well, almost) ... sid - candidates for future Debian stable. All considered stable releases upstream. Ideally, creating new sections should be as simple as sending a message to the ftp-masters. 'Full' Distributions Each section should be have full Packages and Release files including packages from sid and that experimental section. Hopefully this would encourage more people to use experimental all the time. Having more people use experimental would make developers more willing to upload things to experimental. BTS Support for tracking when bugs were changed - AFAIK, already been worked on This will be more important when there are a large number of users/testers using different distributions - sid and experimental. Automatic builds - I want galeon to be built on all architectures automatically. Having a simple email interface would be nice, but automatic for every upload would be better. The changes I'm proposing here would move packages from sid to experimental - they are automatically built for sid already, so this won't incurr much build time. We would need more disk space than currently used - e.g. so that the exp.-gnome section could be built in a chroot with sid and exp.-gnome; exp-.gnome-woody could be built with woody and exp-gnome-woody. Obviously it would require some more processor time, but IMHO this is well worth it. If buildd machines are falling behind, why don't we spend some of the money Debian has? Is there any real data as to which buildds are struggling? One other useful idea to reduce load would be to have some option on the buildds for don't attempt a rebuild (of any version) until bug x has been fixed. In summary, changes like these would mean: - more people use experimental - sid has fewer experimental packages + it is broken less often (perhaps the 'unstable' name should be changed?) + testing is kept recent more often - It would make it possible to have official support for things like gnome backports - It may make it easier to experiment with things like having separate server and desktop releases. (In terms of applying the separate sections idea to the whole of Debian) Does anybody have any additions for thses ideas, or any ideas for other changes to aid sarge+1 development? -- .''`. Mark Howard : :' : `. `' http://www.tildemh.com `- [EMAIL PROTECTED] | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
