Release management thoughts for Dapper Drake

[Scott James Remnant]

On Sat, 2005-10-15 at 12:00 +0100, Jeff Waugh wrote:

> <quote who="Scott James Remnant">
> 
> > Just to throw some numbers into the discussion, a comparison between
> > breezy main and unstable gives us:
> > 
> > Local Packages:   841	- basically X.org and friends
> > Local Newer:      119	- basically GNOME and KDE
> > 
> > Up To Date:       555 
> > Packaging Only:   306	- same upstream, different debian revision
> > Minor Fixes:      281	- upstream version didn't change much
> > 
> > OTHER              54
> 
> Reckon you can generate the delta between unstable at hoary release, and our
> main at breezy UVF or release? That's a far more pertinent historical POV on
> what our churn will be like. This is all about the churn, not the work to
> sync and merge.
> 
Sadly we don't have the data of what Debian unstable looked like at that
time, since snapshot.debian.net melted it just doesn't exist anymore.
From memory and guesses from the mom logs though, our number of "local"
packages has trebled and the "OTHER" is almost a quarter of the hoary
number[0].

I don't see what the churn, or work to sync and merge has to do with a
discussion on the potential stability of the resulting distribution.
The goal of continuing UpstreamVersionFreeze, as far as I can see, would
be simply that we didn't introduce new, potentially unstable, versions
into the distribution.

My point is that there aren't many packages that we wouldn't want to
sync even given that, as there are useful minor changes we may as well
have -- as they include bug fixes.

If it's stability we're concerned about, the things we _SHOULDN'T_ put
in are the big things like GNOME and X.

Or are you just concerned about the amount of time the distro team
spends on actually processing syncs and merges?  I just don't think it's
that high.  More time now is spent on maintaining that huge number of
"local" packages (half of main!)

Scott

[0] probably unsurprising, since release Debian have been involved in a
    C++ transition which we already did.
-- 
Scott James Remnant
scott at ubuntu.com
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