[cut-team] cut-rolling, cut-rolling-*

[Lucas Nussbaum]

On 16/08/10 at 11:14 +0200, Reinhard Tartler wrote:
> Idea: have both 'cut' and 'cut-rolling' suites
> 
>   - the 'cut' suite is strictly following testing, similar to how
>     testing follows unstable. This means that normally, cuts are kept in
>     sync with testing, but during freezes, migrations from 'testing' to
>     'cut' are kept manually. This way we ensure that the current RT
>     does most of the work for 'cut' during their regular work on 'testing'.

So what you call 'cut' is what I call 'rolling', basically. While what
I call 'cut' is the actual snapshot (frozen except for security updates)
of testing (It's likely that there wouldn't be a 'cut' suite, but
several -- one per snapshot).

>   - the 'cut-rolling' suite contains (semi- ?) automated backports from
>     *experimental* (not testing). Direct uploads to 'cut-rolling' are not
>     permitted. This should encourage people that care for 'cuts' to care
>     for testing at the same time, even if that only means to not disturb
>     the 'regular' testing migration. QA for 'cut-rolling' is therefore
>     ensured on two levels:
> 
>      1. since it is based on 'cuts', we get the our well-known testing QA
>         that has proven to work pretty well
>      2. for add-on packages, the cut team reviews backports nominations
>         by individual package maintainers.
> 
> I imagine that cut-rolling has most relevance when we freeze for a
> release, like right now.  During regular development with mostly
> unsupervised transitions, cut-rolling is likely to ship less backports.

So this would be a suite for which APT pinning would not install
packages by default, but from which packages would be available for
users that want them?

I don't really see how this would work without much human intervention,
since you would need to backport other packages together with a given
package. And the fact that a package builds fine doesn't mean that it
works. Who would test the backports before they land in cut-rolling ?

- Lucas