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

[Nicolas Delvaux]

Hi everyone,

On Fri, 2013-03-02 at 09:32 +0000, Colin Watson wrote:

> 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. :-)

For example, in the last few hours, French testers have complained about
packages such as Skype or Wine that were removed by a dist-upgrade.

To be honest, we find the current Raring boring mainly because there is
not much new things in it yet. Quantal was boring and stable to, until
all new features started to land after the feature freeze (and, in the
end, Quantal turned out to be the usual not-stable-until-2-month release).


About monthly "releases", I think this is a good idea.
You can do the best you can to enforce testing everywhere, it's just
impossible to cover everything. You can't guarantee that my computer
will still boot after an upgrade, this needs real world testing.

To manage that, big changes (new kernel major version, new X stack...)
could land in the rolling release just after the last snapshot, in order
to be more confident in the usability of the next snapshot.

The target audience of each version seems clear to me:
- LTS <- stable: for Average Joe
- Monthly <- should be safe: for advanced/enthusiasts users
- Rolling <- should be safe, but unexpected breakages are still
possible: for developers

Personally, I would be interested to run the rolling release on my home
computer and to run the monthly release at work (I'm a developer).

My 2 cents ;)
Nicolas