Let's Discuss Interim Releases (and a Rolling Release)

[Robbie Williamson]

On 02/28/2013 02:49 PM, David Henningsson wrote:
> On 02/28/2013 05:09 PM, Martin Pitt wrote:
>>>   * Keep doing daily quality and keep improving our daily quality.
>>
>> Big +1. I'm particularly looking forward to integrating our automatic
>> package tests with britney.
> 
> The QA work done in -proposed has increased the productivity for the
> rest of us, no doubt about that.
> 
> But still, a word of caution here. Every piece of code even remotely
> related to the hardware, not only the Linux kernel but also most of the
> plumbing layer, is quite difficult (or even impossible) to automate
> testing for. Even if we would set up robots in our lab looking at the
> screen for artifacts, talking into the microphone and so on, we wouldn't
> cover the world's hardware.
> 
> Hardware becomes increasingly complex, diverse, and so testing it takes
> a lot of time. You can't go test thousands of machines to see if their
> headphone outputs stopped working every single day.
> 
> Do we have a plan to deal with those types of bugs?

Maybe I'm missing something, but don't we have this problem *now*,
regardless of a rolling release or not?  The only way to reasonably
solve this is get hardware OEMs to participate, who can't even tolerate
our 6 month cadence and thus do so on the LTS...which isn't changing.

-- 
Robbie Williamson <robbie at ubuntu.com>
robbiew[irc.freenode.net]

"Don't make me angry...you wouldn't like me when I'm angry."
 -Bruce Banner