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

[Martin Pitt]

David Henningsson [2013-02-28 21:49 +0100]:
> 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?

I fully agree, and this is not even limited to the kernel. There are
other kinds of "major transitions" like switching to a new X.org
server, preparing a new major Qt or GNOME release, new eglibc, etc. Or
we want to do a complex transition such as moving from ConsoleKit to
logind.

For those we'll need temporary staging areas which are not put into
the RR yet until they get a sufficient amount of testing; these could
be "topic PPAs" which interested people would enable and develop in,
which get landed into the RR when everything is ready?

Martin
-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)