[cut-team] Snapshots

[Anthony Towns]

On Fri, Aug 27, 2010 at 17:21, Joey Hess <joeyh at debian.org> wrote:
> I am all for something that is easy, especially to start, but I think we
> may have other reasons to want multiple snapshots. One is so that
> upgrades from the current to the next snapshot can be tested (for
> more than the 6 hours before the next britney run) before releasing it.

Hmm, I was working on the assumption that the "constantly usable" part
of CUT would let us choose a snapshot to release without much stress;
if we're talking about more than maybe an hour's worth of automatic
checks to make that decision, things might get more complicated. I
guess that comes down to what guarantees you actually want to offer
vis-a-vis

    """In general the procedures for updating testing should ensure
any snapshot is almost entirely functional, and users should not be
led to expect the same level of quality from CUT snapshots as they
would expect from a stable release."""

(I'm presuming we could do automatic tests of upgrading from snapshot
to current testing -- and that users will be doing that too anyway --
so we'll only be missing any problems that are actually caused by the
last hours'/day's worth of migrations to testing anyway)

Hmm. Another question -- if we're building d-i images for a squeeze
snapshot, what happens for the official squeeze images? Do we do a
hard base-freeze, then upload d-i images especially build for squeeze?
Or do we just pull in the latest d-i images from either
squeeze-snapshot or sid? (I'm not sure what's currently done here) Do
we want the squeeze-snapshot images to get put in dists/squeeze?
Presumably not if they pull from a snapshot, though we could use
symlinks to make that ok at release time...

>> Hmm. Maybe we could ignore that -- if we build a CD from the CUT
>> snapshot, and install from the CD, then the testing symlink on the CD
>> should just point at the CUT snapshot anyway, and everything might
>> work ok.
> Such a CD would happily upgrade the base system to testing over the net,
> and proceed to install tasks from testing.

Yup, but if you're going from a snapshot and have a CD, there's no
need to grab stuff off the net too. Unless, you know, you got a
minimal CD or only CD#1 or similar. But maybe if you're installing
from the net, ending up with testing proper is an ok outcome.

Cheers,
aj

-- 
Anthony Towns <aj at erisian.com.au>