Review: Syncing from testing a success?

[Martin Pitt]

Hello Ubuntu developers,

In Lucid we have switched the default syncing source from Debian
unstable to testing [1], to avoid getting only pieces of large transitions
which we then need to untangle ourselves, and generally avoid
importing major regressions which are held back from Debian testing
through reported RC bugs.

This comes at the cost of a bigger wave of new package versions in the
next release, and with the increased cost of more manual sync requests
from unstable.

Usually we'd switch back to unstable for 10.10 (maverick), but now is
a good time for a review how the syncing from testing actually worked
in practice and whether we'll keep it for LTSes, all releases, or drop
it again.

I have my own gut feeling about this, but to get from that to a
sensible general evaluation we need to collect the gut feelings and
practical experience of a lot of our developers.

So, in your opinion, did syncing from testing

 (1) help to avoid introducing larger breakage into Ubuntu (for the
     domain you are usually watching)

 (2) meant a smaller or larger amount of review and sync requests

 (3) made it easier or harder to merge with Debian and get changes
     integrated back upstream

 (4) made library transitions easier or harder

 (5) anything else that caused or eased problems that you can think
     of

In order to not bias the discussion, I'll send my own experience as a
followup later on.

Thank you in advance for your answers, and let's have an outstanding
Lucid release!

Martin

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LTS
-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)
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