Review: Syncing from testing a success?

[Bryce Harrington]

On Thu, Apr 08, 2010 at 09:41:48PM +0200, Martin Pitt wrote:

The following is strictly considering the X.org packages only.
(Requirements had us pulling new X versions fairly aggressively.)

> So, in your opinion, did syncing from testing
> 
>  (1) help to avoid introducing larger breakage into Ubuntu (for the
>      domain you are usually watching)

No.  Debian-X tends to be pretty careful.  Once stuff appears in
-unstable it's gotten good review and tends to be solid.  For X the
level of risk pulling from unstable is not much different than from
testing.
 
>  (2) meant a smaller or larger amount of review and sync requests

It notably increased the amount of sync requests we filed, although the
time-per-sync is small.  Better syncing tools would help.

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

It introduced some time lag into getting fixes from Debian, which
impacted our work a bit and caused some extra labor overhead.  But not a
major issue, just an irritation mostly.

>  (4) made library transitions easier or harder

Somewhat harder, basically ditto #3.

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

For X.org purposes IMO syncing from Testing overall in total was a
slight hinderance.  If it helped other parts of the distro it's probably
worth the extra irritation, but for X I don't think it brought
any substantive benefits.

> 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!

Bryce