Follow Up from "Let's Discuss Interim Releases"

[Philip Muskovac]

On Saturday 09 March 2013 14:56:55 Phillip Susi wrote:
> On 03/09/2013 12:29 PM, Scott Kitterman wrote:
> > One thing I have not seen described (or possibly I missed it - there's
> > been a lot of traffic on this topic) is how the transition from "It's
> > rolling" to "We're getting ready to release an LTS" would happen?
> 
> Yes, there hasn't been much discussion on that yet.  I see two possible
> options:
> 
> 1)  In the say, 3 months leading up to LTS, we impose a freeze.  This
> would be basically what debian does, where they freeze testing, fix
> bugs, then finally release that as the new stable release. Then after
> the stable release, we open a new archive for the next development
> release.  The down side to this is that for that time, new development
> stops.
> 
> 2)  Rather than upload to raring, then freeze, then release raring as
> stable, change the model slightly so we have uploads going to the
> "unstable" release.  Then say, 3 months prior to the deadline for the
> new stable release, we open a new archive for that release, and copy the
> unstable release to it.  Then bugs would be fixed in the stable release,
> while new development can continue concurrently in unstable.

The *good* side of being frozen and stopping development, is that you actually 
force people to stop developing and instead concentrate on testing and fixing 
bugs. The moment you open a new development branch developer attention will 
turn to that instead of stabilizing the LTS.

(Sure, people will focus on the LTS too, but it won't be the same as when 
that's the only thing you can concentrate on)

Philip