[cut-team] Ideas for the rolling release

[Lucas Nussbaum]

On 15/08/10 at 23:34 +0200, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> while reading the backlog I had few ideas/suggestions. First for the poll,
> I want to see both "rolling" and the snapshots.
> 
> Idea: support only a limited set of architectures in rolling
>  - users that want bleeding edge and that can't cope with testing or
>    unstable are mainly desktop users and desktop users mainly use
>    i386/amd64
>  - it also means simplified management of migrations when rolling get
>    updates directly from sid during the freeze

I agree that temporarily, it would make sense to be more aggressive at
breaking installability of other architectures. However, in non-freeze
times, I think that we should try to match testing as much as
possible. A possible implementation could be "start by matching testing,
manually hint where needed to get important packages earlier in testing,
see how this goes and reconsider having our own britney if needed".

> Idea: allow targetted sid backports in rolling during freeze
>  - those backports could help disentangle transitions and make it more
>    likely to be able to push updates without breaking other packages
>  - lucas mentionned this possibility but only for updates requested by
>    users, I think it's important for the reason above.

Well, rolling would never be frozen, except when preparing the snapshots
(if needed, but that would probably be <<1 week of freeze). So, when
testing is frozen to prepare a stable release, it would mean that
transitions would continue normally to rolling. (we would have to run a
separate britney for sure, then).

> Comments:
>  - I want a usable rolling release but I'm uneasy with the fact that it's
>    not testing... the people using rolling should really implicitly
>    contribute on improving our next stable release. Ideally, testing
>    should be a branch of rolling that starts at freeze time.
>    
>    So we should really consider that rolling starts separate because it's
>    an experiment but at some point it should replace testing most of time
>    except during freeze. Hence it's important to have release managers
>    involved...

Yes, I agree with that way to see it. It's also important to try to
minimize the impact on other teams (i.e, not come up with a long list of
demands to the release team).

- Lucas