Debian Sync - Re: Let's Discuss Interim Releases (and a Rolling Release)

[Micah Gersten]

On 02/28/2013 12:17 PM, Dmitrijs Ledkovs wrote:
> On 28 February 2013 17:05, Scott Kitterman <ubuntu at kitterman.com> wrote:
>> On Thursday, February 28, 2013 07:31:49 AM Rick Spencer wrote:
>>> Daily Quality means that developers can ensure their components are stable
>>> and useful before they upload, and our processes protect us from most
>>> mistakes these days. The result is that 13.04 has been as robust a release
>>> over the last many weeks as 12.10 was when we delivered. We have achieved
>>> rolling release quality in our development practices, so we can capitalize
>>> on this capability now.
>> Don't forget that Debian has been in Freeze throughout this time.  Once Wheezy
>> is released, we will start getting a lot more, less mature, packages via
>> Debian sync.   ~75% of the archive comes from Debian unmodified in Ubuntu and
>> the experience during 13.04 development with packages from Debian is definitely
>> atypical.
>>
>> Also, it is normal to upload beta releases to the development series.  It's a
>> simple fact that they are not going to be as polished as we'd like for regular
>> users.  You can beat the daily quality drum all you want for Canonical
>> sponsored development effort, but that's not where most of our software comes
>> from.
>>
> But just like debian we know have britney, together with many
> automatic adt tests which we run on all reverse dependencies in
> jenkins. Uploading beta version of software into sid has never been
> welcomed and by default it gets released versions of software. Thus
> I'd expect our devel release to be more stable than testing.
>
Yes, but our britney doesn't delay migration to allow for testing of the
built packages or block based on RC bugs filed.  I see us getting to the
point at some time in the future of being more stable than testing in a
rolling release, but I don't see it right now.  Perhaps if we had our
own version of unstable/testing in the rolling release, we could
approach that level of quality.  However, being that Debian has
maintainers for each package (in theory) and we don't, I'm not sure that
Ubuntu has the manpower to do this type of split.

Thanks,
Micah