[cut-team] CUT thoughts

[Lucas Nussbaum]

On 14/08/10 at 11:28 -0400, Anthony Towns wrote:
> 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.

How would this differentiate from other distributions doing 6-month
release cycles, and in particular Ubuntu, which can already be seen as
Debian snapshots (+ added value)?

Doing "snapshot testing for installation, with only minimal security
support, then tell users to use rolling", we provide something quite
unique in the Free Software world, with a constant flux of new upstream
releases. This only adds minimal (but interesting) work for the project,
with huge benefits for the "relevance" of Debian in the Free Software
world, since rolling will constantly be one of the places where
freshly-released software will get real users.

I agree with your concern about security support for testing/rolling,
and the fact that "please just dist-upgrade" is not really a solution.
But this could be solved by other means, for example by having a tool
(similar to apt-listchanges) that would scan changelogs for CVEs and
warn the user when upgradable packages provide security fixes. The user
would then be able to upgrade only those packages.

- Lucas