Debian discusses vendoring—again

Posted Jan 22, 2021 2:48 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Debian discusses vendoring—again by murukesh
Parent article: Debian discusses vendoring—again

You couldn't release anything weekly. There are just not enough time to find and fix problems in any new features.

The most you can promise if you “release” weekly is “hey, it passed our automatic testing and therefore we hope it's not completely broken”. That's not a release. 20 years ago it would be called “alpha version” (not even “beta”: beta is supposed to be tested by some testing teams before release, not just pass CI bot). I'm not even sure that thing which they call “an LTS release” can be compared to “normal” stable release of XX century software which you can actually trust.

The really strange result of all that activity is the fact that as “release cadence” shortens the actual, tangible, changes become less and less frequent. But resource consumption and number of bugs skyrockets. Simply because nobody can understand how the whole thing is supposed to work — and the amount of band-aids applied to pile of existing band-aids which ensure that the whole thing doesn't crash immediately upon startup is just endlessly grows.

As Hoare (original inventor of Quicksort) said: there are two ways of constructing a software design — one way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.

What we are looking on in that pile of weekly “releases” and pile of “containers” is the end result of application of 2nd principle.