[cut-team] Ideas for the rolling release

[Lucas Nussbaum]

On 15/08/10 at 19:04 -0500, Anthony Towns wrote:
> But maybe there's a clearer explanation of what "rolling" is meant to
> achieve that would completely make sense of everything for me.

"rolling" is a new suite, similar to testing, that aims at providing
something constantly usable for end users. The main reason for creating
a new suite is to be able to make different compromises about migrations
and breakages:

+ ignore breakages on (not i386 or amd64) when it allows important
  packages (popular or fixing security issues) to migrate earlier

+ allow not suitable for stable release but perfectly suitable if used
  fresh packages in

+ be able to continue normal operations when testing is frozen

+ minimize the impact on the release team

As a bonus, we get a better name ("testing" is not really great for
marketing).

As goals (in non-freeze times) are similar, this suite would be very
similar to testing (this should also avoid duplicating too much
work between the release team and the "rolling team").

I agree that most of the reasons address marginal cases (it is not
surprising, as the release team does a very good job keeping testing
usable). If we end up finding out that all the changes can be
implemented in testing itself (that would require finding a solution for
freeze times), we could switch rolling to a symlink of testing.
But as a start, I think that it's important not to inflict that on the
release team, and start the experiment with a separate suite.

- Lucas