On Wed, Jan 05, 2005 at 04:16:49AM -0800, Stephen Birch wrote:
> Perhaps a date based release mechanism could be built using a new
> distribution, call it prestable.
>
> Packages qualify to be enter prestable after residing in testing for
> ten days and having NO RC BUGS. The idea is to keep prestable in a
> highly stable state at all times, a rolling stable if you will.
That's how testing started off. We stopped doing this because
a) it at one point stalled glibc; as a result, nothing moved to testing
anymore, and when it finally did, the changes were so dramatic that
testing was broken for quite some time.
b) Some RC bugs are only discovered when they migrate to testing. If the
promise of 'prestable' would be that it would contain NO RC BUGS,
then we would have to throw those out. That would likely result in
prestable being a very incomplete system.
Also, adding yet another distribution that is even harder to update than
testing is doesn't seem like a good idea to me. We're already having
issues with testing and security; $DEITY forbid that we would make it
worse.
(not being a member of the release team, the above isn't guaranteed to
be right in all details; but I don't think I'm way off base here)
--
EARTH
smog | bricks
AIR -- mud -- FIRE
soda water | tequila
WATER
-- with thanks to fortune
