Position Summary: Dapper Drake Release Management

<quote who="Mark Shuttleworth">

> Second, there's the question of syncing and UVF. Having listened to the
> debate I'm leaning to the camp that says that the major breakages we
> experience are all tied to feature goals, hardware (kernel), and X, which
> will all get revved in any event. I am therefor strongly in favour of
> syncing from Debian and upstream for the first few months of Dapper's
> existence, rather than continuing on the "core" of Breezy. I think we will
> get as many  bug fixes as new bugs, and we will ultimately get a better
> platform.

Major breakages are indeed tied to feature goals. Subtle breakage that we're
not keenly aware of is far more likely to arrive through unchecked changes
synchronised with Debian sid. Getting 'as many bug fixes as new bugs' is not
good enough for dapper - we won't be able to share bug exposure with breezy,
we'll have to spend more time testing instead of concentrating on merging
bug fixes only.

I think I would really only be comfortable trusting a wide open syncing
policy if UVF were brought forward to the two or four week point - much
shorter than our standard UVF timeframe!

But this is not so much about avoiding the major punch-in-the-face breakage
of our feature goal work, more about the stuff we don't see until it's too
late (that is, end user deployment time).

- Jeff

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linux.conf.au 2006: Dunedin, New Zealand               http://linux.conf.au/
 
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