[rfc] Fix committed/released distinction

[vila]

>>>>> Andrew Cowie <andrew at operationaldynamics.com> writes:

    > On Fri, 2011-04-08 at 15:11 +0200, John Arbash Meinel wrote:
    >> Except some people only get things via a ppa. And others can only get it
    >> via stable updates, and others can have no trouble downloading trunk and
    >> getting it from there.

    > Gah, come on, release means release, as in "bug is fixed in a release
    > made by the project".

No.

For the average[1] user it means: I have a bug, can I have a fix ? How ?

    > In Bazaar's case, that would be tarball + (since you guys offer a
    > PPA of your releases,) .deb in your PPA. When that happens, the
    > fix is indeed released.

No.

bzr trunk (and some plugins) is packaged daily, in ppa:bzr/daily without
anyone cutting tarballs.

    > Now, the fact that your bug tracker offers two states ("fix
    > committed" and "fix released") for what other bug trackers call
    > "resolved" is lovely, but I don't think these continual [how often
    > do we have this conversation here? Once every 3 months?]

Discussing is still cheaper than guiding users from a bug to the fix
(including bug triage). 

And AFAIK, this problem is not solved yet, if only people because can't
agree which means the status is still blurry for *users*.

    > attempts to redefine terminology used and accepted by large groups
    > of other people is going to get you very far.

Have a look at <http://pad.lv/163694> (high S/N) for many good reasons
to keep them separate and many good reasons to not.

In a nutshell: for a dev, there should be a status meaning: "I'm done,
go packagers", for a user (and even packagers) there should be a status
meaning: "The fix is part of package X.Y.Z".

The discussion is about making it easier for everybody involved and
minimize both effort and friction.

         Vincent


[1]: I can elaborate about user, devs and packagers different points of
views, but in the end, some users just have no idea about what version
they are using *anyway*.