Stable GNOME updates, how could be do better?

[Martin Pitt]

Luca Falavigna [2009-07-29 14:12 +0200]:
> This would happen if more users tested the beta release, but that cannot
> be enforced, and a larger portion of Ubuntu users will wait the final
> release, and then report bugs.

Right, that's the classic chicken-and-egg problem. However, it's not
that we would need bug reports from stable release updates in order to
keep ourselves busy. We already have way more bug reports than we
could process. Obviously that doesn't catch things like hardware
specific regressions, I'm just saying that the quality of final
releases could potentially be much better even without more beta
testers. The main bottleneck is development power by and large, not
user feedback.

> What about using -proposed for every GNOME stable release? I think we
> should definitely trust GNOME release managers, we already do this for
> packages we includes in our stable releases without checking line by
> line code they publish.

How do you mean? We had a standing GNOME SRU exception for hardy
(mainly because we had the major gvfs transition in hardy, which
brought many regressions), but intrepid/jaunty GNOME releases have the
same constraints than any other packages.

Of course we as a developer body can decide to change the policy
(through TB), but that's the current policy.

> If that sounds scary, we could use pinning to allow update on demand
> only, so people who are really interested could confirm an upgrade
> and test it in a more accurate fashion.

That's by and large the same situation (opt-in updates with the risk
being on the users' side), just a different technical implementation,
isn't it?

Martin
-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)
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