[cut-team] Ideas for the rolling release

[Joey Hess]

Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> I am one of those that believe that testing is mostly usable but we have a
> bunch of DD who thinks the opposite and who regularly tell users that
> testing is not usable. I think "rolling" is trying to fix some of the
> perceived problems that lead those developers to make those claim.

Hmm. My impression is that most DDs do not communicate with most Debian
users. Although I'm sure most DDs have some small set of friends or
whatever who they do communicate with. You will, for example, find
few DDs posting to debian-user.

I think that any misconceptions about the usability/security/whatever of
testing have developed and spread more indirectly, and memetically, and
with lots of lag.

> > Hypothetically, I think some of those might even be good ideas; but in
> > practice the liklihood that it just confuses developers and makes the
> > release team's job harder still seems to outweigh the benefits to me
> > (adding a suite or changing testing are both likely to be confusing,
> > in different ways).
> 
> Huh. Wasn't testing confusing when we introduced it?

I was wondering about that too...

I think that there is limited complexity going from 2 suites (stable and
unstable; experimental can be omitted because it's not used as a standalone
suite) to 3. Most of the confusion I remember about testing was not how it
interacted with stable or unstable, but about the metrics that got packages
into it, and details like learning to understand update-excuses output
and think about how a dependency could block a testing transition.

OTOH, going from 3 to 4 really ramps up the combinatorial complexity of
interactions/propigation between suites to possibly brain-melting
levels.

-- 
see shy jo, whose brain fried at least a bit on the last few messages in
            this subthread
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