Communicating Stability

[Rocco Stanzione]

I subscribe to this list, -devel-announce and others, partly in an attempt to 
keep an eye on the progress of edgy.  I want to know when it's a good idea 
for me, personally, to install it.  There are various thresholds of stability 
for my laptop, my home desktop, and my workstation.  I know where those 
thresholds are, and I've been trying to keep my finger on edgy's pulse so I'd 
know when one of them had been crossed.

This time around, they were all crossed at the same time.  I'd been waiting 
for nvidia driver compatibility with xorg.  I'd actually been looking for it, 
and I didn't know about it until I googled it today, then looked to see that 
the bug had been closed.  I doubt I was the only potential user of or 
contributor to edgy that had been waiting for this.  The point is, it would 
be nice to have something like a progress report on development releases.  
These are the things that are still broken, these things are working pretty 
well and should be stable, we're about to do something crazy with this other 
thing, we just fixed this critical bug, etc.  I know from hanging out on irc 
that the stability level of ubuntu+1 is a much-sought-after piece of 
information.  The standard answer is "it's unstable - if you have to ask, 
don't install it".

I know stability is hard to express and often hard to gauge, but I think we 
could get a lot more ubuntu+1 users (and contributors) if information like 
this were regularly made available.  Fancy new features might also be a 
useful piece of information in this... document?  mailing list?  newsletter?  
wiki page?  .plan?

Thanks,

Rocco