Position Summary: Dapper Drake Release Management

On Tue, Oct 18, 2005 at 02:00:01AM +0200, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> <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
>

As a MOTU I would welcome updating main, even if only for a little while, 
otherwise the MOTU team will have a hard time of sorting out the tangled
dependencies of universe->main with main frozen (which we had in post-UVF
breezy).
However I know that it's Debian _unstable_ that we're syncing from, and a 
mess of updated packages in main could suck quite a bit of time that could 
otherwise be spent on getting our goals done in sufficient time to get
serious testing (SELinux as my pet example). Perhaps a shift in freeze dates
from breezy could be helpful, so that UVF & feature freeze occur earlier in 
the cycle, and pushing the UVF date for universe to be later in the cycle.


-- 
Andrew Mitchell
JID: ajmitch at jabber.org
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