[cut-team] Rethinking CUT

[Raphael Hertzog]

Hi,

On Thu, 09 Sep 2010, Michael Gilbert wrote:
> From my reading, I've identified the following three problems as the
> root causes that spawned the CUT meme (there may be others, and
> additional thoughts are very welcome):
> 
>     1.  The provided testing installation media is often broken, missing
>         functionality, and at times unable to install testing itself.
> 
>     2.  Packages are sometimes temporarily unavailable in testing.
> 
>     3.  Public (mis)perception of the name "testing".

4. No timely security fixes and in general no official support from Debian.

> In terms of issue #2, I think that is already addressed somewhat by
> snapshot.debian.org.  If a package goes missing from testing, all one

Hu, no. I don't expect the usual end-user to go look for packages
elsewhere than his currently installed distribution. He should not have
to manually install packages grabbed over HTTP or add any other
repository in his source.list.

> needs to do is find a snapshot from sufficiently far back.  Admittedly,
> there is no user-friendly way to go about that currently.  Right now, to
> pick up an old version, one would manually need to add a bunch of apt
> sources, and eventually find one has a package that works.  However, it
> should be fairly straightforward to write a few additional tools to make
> that more automated.  Again, I don't see the need to invent new releases
> to address this problem.  I would call the project to address #2
> something like Constantly Available Old Versions (or CAOV).

I would call this "papering over the root problem" instead of "fixing the
root problem" as you say it.

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer ◈ [Flattr=20693]

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