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

[Scott Kitterman]

On Friday, March 01, 2013 05:50:35 AM Martin Pitt wrote:
> 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?

For people or teams that are largely or entirely !canonical, this only works 
if all you care about is x86 (i386/amd64).  Anything for armhf (or powerpc) 
would have to land untested since the PPAs that are available for !canonical 
don't build these architectures.

Scott K