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

[Scott Kitterman]

On Thursday, February 28, 2013 12:59:19 PM Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 03:11:27PM -0500, Jeremy Bicha wrote:
> > On 28 February 2013 14:33, Micah Gersten <micahg at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> > > 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.
> > 
> > I think we need to train our britney to block on Debian or Ubuntu RC
> > bugs. Maybe this will also allow the Kubuntu developers to package the
> > KDE beta updates without needing to worry about those getting picked
> > up in the next (monthly?) update cycle.
> 
> It is fundamental to the model that has been implemented for $devel-proposed
> in Ubuntu that we *don't* block packages in -proposed for anything other
> than consistency and installability, because to do otherwise would
> dramatically increase the on-hands management required to keep -proposed
> from becoming a tangled logjam.  We don't want to reproduce that part of
> the Debian testing experience.
> 
> We expect packages to undergo pre-upload testing to shake out bugs of such a
> severity that we would want to protect users of the devel release from
> seeing them.  It is indeed a big question mark how we would handle this for
> packages imported from Debian, but I think that having britney block
> packages between raring-proposed and raring for this would be disastrous.
> 
> I do think that while 75% of the archive is imported unmodified from Debian,
> the vast majority of these packages are in the long tail that both a) don't
> individually have many users in Ubuntu, and b) don't have anyone paying
> attention to bug reports in Ubuntu.  We already import these packages with
> RC bugs from Debian unstable; we already don't commit to fixing these in
> the Ubuntu devel series; we already release these packages to users as part
> of the 6-monthly releases.  So I don't think a rolling release actually
> changes anything here.  And with or without a rolling release, there are
> ways we can improve our response to Debian RC bugs in Ubuntu if there are
> people willing to work on that.

It's not just dark corners of the archive.  We also get about 1/3 (estimating 
visually from the MoM graphic) of Main unmodified from Debian:

https://merges.ubuntu.com/main-now.png

Scott K