[cut-team] CUT thoughts

[Anthony Towns]

Hi *,

One of the things that might be useful is getting a better idea of
what "CUT" means -- I think there are still a few different ideas of
what CUT is trying to achieve.

For context, I'm personally pretty happy using testing -- there's only
a few times I want something that isn't in testing, and when that
happens, about half the time what I want isn't in unstable either
(isabelle, latest Xorg, latest kernel).

The times when I'm not happy with testing are when I'd ideally be
running stable, but can't because I need new drivers or similar -- so
I install stable, upgrade to testing, fix the breakage from udev or
similar not doing a smooth upgrade, and then spend time worrying about
the fact that either I'm going to be behind on security updates or
I'll need to do regular full dist-upgrades and risk having significant
unexpected changes in how things work that I'll need to spend time
understanding.

For me, the proposals that I think will make this better for me are
regular/frequent snapshots of testing and security support for them.
That way I can directly install the most recent snapshot, set it up to
automatically install security updates, and plan for functionality
changes when the next CUT snapshot happens.

I would like to see more uploads to unstable (newer kernels, newer X,
etc) and more propogation to testing (Lucas mentioned wesnoth, which
is blocked by the maintainer's request because squeeze is targetting
1.8, which is released upstream but hasn't been uploaded afaics, not
1.6 which is in unstable). I think it'd be great if CUT somehow helped
with that, but I don't see how it will.

To me, that means starting by choosing a day to snapshot testing every
3-6 months, including an installer for the snapshot, and doing
security support for the snapshot until (at least) the next snapshot
is released.

As far as "weather report" stuff is concerned I'm not sure what
additional criteria people are worried about, beyond what testing
already checks. If there are some, it ought to be plausible to have
the testing scripts check them directly. The only time the weather
will get worse then is when the release team determine it's stuck in a
local maximum, and a few days of bad weather is the only way to
further improve things overall.

Cheers,
aj

-- 
Anthony Towns <aj at erisian.com.au>