Greg Wooledge wrote: ... > The overwhelming majority of people who track testing think that it's > a rolling release. It's not. It's actually a series of evolving > release candidates, with periods of great disruption interspersed with > periods of relative calm. > > You're clearing replying to someone who thinks it's a single rolling > release, so set your expectations accordingly.
yes, we experience it as it happens, which can sometimes be months or even years before the official stable release happens and new images are built. the comment about release candidates is appropriate because that is why such things as RC bugs are filed and attempted to be fixed before a release actually happens, but that release is a stable and official one and not as far as i've ever seen it is not a "release" so calling it a rolling release is a contradiction in terminology. it is not a release, but it is a collection of packages in a certain state of being which can change as new packages migrate from unstable (or via testing-pu or via other means that perhaps i'm not aware of). i just know that for sure it is not "magic". :) someone has to do it and make the upload and other things may come along and make changes (janitor programs are now doing some things, etc.) release notes may not be written and some cases may even be forgotten about. with testing, stuff can happen, like sid, stuff can break. that is just how it goes and i'm quite ok with that because i also do keep a stable partition (which is currently not upgraded yet and won't be until a point release or two down the line). my stable is even more stable than the released stable. there's nobody to force me to upgrade or mysterious software controlled by someone else running to mess with my machine (as i do not run auto updates). can you point me to any official statement from the project as a whole which says that testing is released and there are official images for people to download? i know of daily and weekly builds of the installer and some images but i have never seen any statement from the project as a whole that "testing" is a release candidate and treated as such. yes, it is the basis of the next stable release, but it is not anything more than a pool of packages in a directory structure which can be copied and updated like any other directory. it is, in other words, the collection of packages which are used which are the stable release and not anything else which is the main product of making such a stable release and it is the release team which builds that and puts it all together. as far as i'm concerned it is the release team which has that delegated authority but i guess if they wanted to build "official testing" images or any other collection they surely could, but i'd be a happy little potato doing as i have been and running from the testing viewpoint (which can change from moment to moment). i consider the release process as a whole which includes at some point making copies of symlinks to the package pool and renaming various pathways or copying things as the whole point of making a release and then building images and such which do include the codename and not using things such as "testing", "sid", "experimental" or "rc-buggy" or ... i don't really think my viewpoint is far from the reality of what does happen, but if anyone from the release team cares to pipe up i'd listen. songbird
