[cut-team] Constant usability: leverage maintainers' manpower and snapshots?

[Charles Plessy]

Dear all,

I read again Joey's initial proposal on his wiki, and was wondering about the
first goal, that Testing should be installable at all times.

I think that one of the possible ways to achieve that, now that we have robust
snapshots, is to downgrade some packages if it is obvious that the one in
Testing is broken and that Sid does not contain the solution. For some security
problems (but obviously not all), it may be a solution too.

Manpower is definitely a strong limitation, this is already clear when seeing
the difficulty of preparing a RC bug-free stable release. One way to tap
into available manpower is to give more possibilities of immediate action to
the developers who are interested in recommending the use of their packages
through Testing or CUT.

A simple flat file, stored in a VCS and writable by all DDs, that allows to
control which version of a package is in Testing or CUT, using Sid, Stable,
earlier CUTs and in last ressort snapshots.debian.org, would in my opinion
help to have some work done transparently without requesting time or attention
from a CUT or a Testing-security team.

Have a nice day,

-- 
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan