[cut-team] "weather" report, what to include?

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Mon, Aug 09, 2010 at 03:12:40PM -0400, Joey Hess wrote:
> So I want to take advantage of the freeze:
<snip>
> 3. Deal with upgrades. (Someone suggested makign a "weather report" 
>    that detects trouble in testing.)

Just a brief comment on this, I totaly agree that we need something like
that. For what concerns "number/ratio of uninstallable packages", that
already exists for testing and is actively maintained by the
EDOS/Mancoosi team I'm a member of. Data can be find starting from
http://edos.debian.net (sorry for not having a more specific address for
esting, but I'm writing this offline). We also have GNOME weather-like
applets in the unofficial repository mancoosi.debian.net: they can be
easily moved to the Debian archive and suggested to cut/rolling users.

However, if we go this way, we probably need a more specific
"cut/rolling weather" which takes into account various factors. One of
those factor will be the number of uninstallable packages, but there can
be more.

For instance I'm still quite worried about packages removed from testing
from transition reasons. Others have argued that "we lack evidence" and
that they are rare cases anyhow; I'm sure that they are rare,
nevertheless if we go ahead promoting a new suite, we need to be able to
give *more guarantees* than the current testing, otherwise there is no
point in doing all this. If we don't find/agree upon a technical way to
ensure those transients removals won't affect rolling users, than at
least we should include information about them in the weather report.

What else should be include in a hypothetical weather report for
cut/rollling to improve user experience?

-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..|  .  |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie
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