Goals of bug triage

Posted Mar 4, 2009 10:40 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

I think that what gevaerts means is that Debian versions do not work that way. I also used to think that bugs are corrected in the transitions from unstable to stable, but after some research found otherwise. For clarity let's call unstable, testing and stable 'branches', and keep 'version' for packages.

Versions are entered into the unstable branch, and after a suitable period they go to testing. They stay there as long as the current version is in testing, or until a new version comes along. Every 18-36 months a new branch (including versions of all packages) becomes stable. But if a problem is found in a package, a new version of the package that corrects that problem comes again through unstable, and eventually promotes again to testing (or not if further problems are found). No changes are made between unstable and testing; patches are always applied before entering unstable.

If Ubuntu draws from the unstable branch they will eventually gather all fixes. Of course it can take 18 to 36 months to get a new version with those fixes, so with a lifecycle of 6 months most of the time Ubuntu is on its own.