Early backports to reduce post-release fixes

[Iain Lane]

On 27 Jan 2009, at 12:28, Reinhard Tartler wrote:

> - the backport teams tracks these bugs and approves backports if
> "enough" positive feedback from users has been given in the LP bug

I thought the intent wasn't to use this as staging for backports, but  
to allow users of stable releases to test packages from the current  
development release without having to upgrade their system wholesale.  
This will help weed out more bugs in the new version before it becomes  
harder to fix them post-release.

I am a bit concerned that the PPA would suffer from the same problem  
that -backports and -proposed suffer from now - that there's no easy  
way for end-users to selectively enable it. Once enabled, they will  
receive updates for all packages that a MOTU cares to upload that they  
have installed. Given that this will carry an image of being  
officially sanctioned in some way, it won't look good if this becomes  
a sort of "development-release-lite", upgrading end-user applications  
and potentially destabilising systems.

Also, I worry that this will become a short-cut to backporting too. I  
can see people requesting new upstreams be released to this new PPA,  
ostensibly "for testing purposes", but really to negate the often- 
protracted backporting process

Just thoughts. The basic premise is good, and I think it would be nice  
to see some movement in this direction.

Iain

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