Debian "Squeeze" release in sight

Posted Jan 21, 2011 23:38 UTC (Fri) by daglwn (guest, #65432)
Parent article: Debian "Squeeze" release in sight

> Of course, many of Debian's users ride the testing or unstable releases
> and pay little attention to stable releases.

Well, that's not entirely true for those of us on testing. A release freeze means that updates to testing essentially stop. We get bugfixes for the next stable and that's it. I've been waiting a very long time for gcc 4.5.x for example. I certainly pay attention to the release status when a freeze is in place.

This is the tradeoff going with testing instead of unstable. I get a more solid distribution at the cost of extended update stalling every now and then.

Now, the interesting question concerns why we have so many release-critical bugs in testing if the point of testing was to shake out bugs early-on in the release process. I suspect that not enough people are using unstable and reporting bugs against it before the 10-day-to-testing window passes. If we got that worked out we could possible see more frequent stable releases.

Debian "Squeeze" release in sight

Posted Jan 23, 2011 2:18 UTC (Sun) by SteveAdept (guest, #5061) [Link]

Unstable is actually just as stuck as testing during freeze.

Debian "Squeeze" release in sight

Posted Jan 30, 2011 10:04 UTC (Sun) by pkern (subscriber, #32883) [Link]

[Bugs are reported too late]
> If we got that worked out we could possible see more frequent stable releases.

Sadly that's not all there is to Debian stable releases. A major blocker to more stable releases is the need to support them security-wise. And to my knowledge we're currently lacking the manpower to sanely support multiple releases in parallel over a longer time frame.

However, if bugs would be reported earlier (and fixed more quickly), we could keep the freeze much shorter.