Re: [poll] Is the megafreeze development model broken?

On Tue, Nov 13, 2007 at 12:13:41AM +0800, Rogelio M. Serrano Jr. wrote:
Adrian Bunk wrote:
On Mon, Nov 12, 2007 at 01:51:25PM +0000, Tuomo Valkonen wrote:

On 2007-11-12, Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I think a megafreeze development model is sane. Finding a collection
of software versions that are all known to work together is very
interesting, and useful. Making it so you can deliver something that
just works to end users is always interesting.

The distros only do that for the most important and most popular
packages, most of which have become rather "generic" and faceless
behemots in the sense that they do not have definite authors and so
on, and for which it takes years to respond to bug reports in any case
(if someone even bothers to enter the bug in registration-required
Suckzilla, Debian's reportbug becoming much more usable in this case,
even though it typically takes another year for the package maintainer
to report things back upstream, if it ever even happens).

Other more marginal software with a face, the distros just throw in
and expect the author to deal with users having problems with ancient
development snapshots and even bugs in stable versions that the distros
simply refuse to fix. They should not distribute that kind of software
at all. That is, distros should stick to providing stable base systems,
and fully supported (and renamed if not generic) customised versions of
other software for their target audience. For the rest, there should
be better mechanisms for authors to distribute binary or otherwise
easily and reliably installable packages of their software.


The problem is not what the distributions ship, the problem is simply
that problems with distribution packaged software should be reported
to the distribution, not upstream.

And for becoming at least marginally on-topic again:
Assuming your "stable base systems" contains the Linux kernel, how would
you prevent users from reporting bugs in their ancient kernels [1] here?

Isn't the kernel easier to sync with latest and greatest?

The core libc and supporting libraries is the core. and the toolchain
the core dev. Those can be updated twice or even once a year. The kernel
can be updated once a month if you like.

A new release of the Linux kernel has more than half a million lines of
code changed. If you do any estimates based on how many lines of changed
code equal one newly introduced bug you see the problem...

And the difference between an upstream kernel and a distribution kernel
are 3-6 months of testing and bugfixing.

I stopped using debian myself and used DIY linux based toolchain and
libc. Thats the stable core that i have been using for 4 months. If
debian can reduce the footprint of the "stable core" and do monthly
releases of package bundles i will use it again.

Geeks like you and me want the latest software
(I'm using Debian unstable/testing).

But most users want a Linux installation that simply works - and this
includes all software on the system at all times.

cu
Adrian

--

"Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
"Only a promise," Lao Er said.
Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed

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