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

[Colin Watson]

On Fri, Mar 01, 2013 at 10:34:25PM -0800, Tobin Davis wrote:
> On Fri, 2013-03-01 at 16:52 +0000, Colin Watson wrote:
> > Just using 'apt-get dist-upgrade' all the time, or something with closer
> > semantics to that, is better.
> 
> Oh, then you've fixed the issue where dist-upgrade removes packages due
> to unmet dependencies (aka pool churn)?

Yes, in the vast majority of cases:

  https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2012-October/036043.html

This is a major part of what Rick is referring to in shorthand as "daily
quality", which has been a big push since 12.04.

> These are serious issues, and frankly I haven't seen any progress to
> indicate otherwise.

I'm surprised, because when I hunt around for people talking about their
experiences running raring I've generally found them favourably
contrasting its stability with that of prior development releases.
Indeed I hear that one group (the French loco, was it?) started
referring to it as "boring", which IMO is an excellent result. :-)

(One problem I've occasionally seen, and I debugged an instance of this
just yesterday, is that some people who've taken part in verifying SRUs
on earlier Ubuntu releases and who've then upgraded to raring still
sometimes have -proposed enabled.  In such cases people are NOT
insulated from what you refer to as "pool churn".  The right fix here is
just to disable raring-proposed, which is not intended for use by
humans.)

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]