Release candidates in main

Emmet Hikory emmet.hikory at gmail.com
Fri Nov 9 12:24:36 UTC 2007


On Nov 9, 2007 9:00 PM, Kai Schroeder writes:
> Apart from the question whether an update should land in updates or
> backports, I think there definitely is a valid point here: Users have
> been taught that beta software (or release candidates) should not be
> used on production machines. Now, every time they start the gimp, a
> splash screen appears which says "release candidate" and a lot of them
> (correctly imho) feel they should not get beta software during a
> distribution upgrade. As someone has said in this thread, the version
> shipped with Ubuntu may even have additional patches to the official
> release candidate. Perhaps, in the future one should think about
> renaming release candidate software (at least when this is so clearly
> visible on a splash screen) to "Ubuntu version" or something like that?

    That is a useful point, but requires maintenance of significant
additional variance to upstream for all cases where additional
branding may be considered useful, and further may require still more
variance in packages to ensure that those shared with Debian are so
adjusted.

    I'd suggest that if such a practice were to be adopted, the best
means to do so would consist of:

1) Performing a review of the gutsy release to identify all release
candidates, beta editions, and VCS snapshots shipped.

2) Performing an analysis of this package list to determine the volume
of code changes required to provide such a solution

3)  Preparing a specification documenting the results, and submitting
for review.

    If the volume of changes is such that there are sufficient
volunteers to commit to completing such an adjustment and maintaining
the differential, the specification may well be approved and
implemented.

    In the absence of such volunteers, I would submit that it may be
worth attempting to encourage users to trust software distributed from
Ubuntu-signed repositories, with knowledge that this software includes
an additional set of patches beyond those available upstream,
specifically targeting stability and security.

-- 
Emmet HIKORY




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