On 11/06/2016 11:59 AM, Marc Haber wrote: > On Sun, 06 Nov 2016 09:38:00 +0000, Niels Thykier <ni...@thykier.net> > wrote: >> Marc Haber: >>> On Sat, 5 Nov 2016 13:46:16 +0100, Sebastiaan Couwenberg >>> <sebas...@xs4all.nl> wrote: >>>> [2017-Jan-05] Soft freeze (no new packages, no re-entry, 10-day >>>> migrations) >>> >>> Does this really mean "once you're out, you'll stay out"? >>> >> Yes. > > That is really really bad.
Why? Any package currently in testing still has time to enter (until roughly end of this year), so it's not like there is no heads-up for people. And RC bugs don't lead to immediate removal from testing, you still have quite a bit of time until they actually cause removal of a package. That means that even if someone reports an RC bug after the soft freeze maintainers (and even other people, RC-bugs have a lower NMU threshold) should have enough time to fix that before the package gets removed. And if the problem is complicated, they have other options: request for help on debian-devel@ and debian-mentors@, request an exception from the release team to mark a bug as stretch-ignore in specific cases, request an extension by the release team to delay autoremoval so they have more time to fix the issue, etc. If a stable release is going to happen, there needs to be some kind of process so that one may converge on a stable result. What happens if you only have a single deadline to freeze fully? Immediately before that deadline people panic because they noticed they didn't take care of their packages enough and upload tons of stuff on very short notice - which leads to more bugs due to weird interactions that will then have to be sorted out during the actual freeze. With the soft deadlines added now, this will be relaxed quite a bit, because everything doesn't hit at once, but it's spaced out and the overall quality will improve. I really don't see where you are coming from: why do you think this makes things worse? The only people affected negatively by this are going to be people asleep at the wheel for the entire Stretch cycle that only wake up right before the hard freeze. And I think that curbing that kind of maintenance "style" is a very, very good thing. Regards, Christian
