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  • From: Tony Smith <tony AT smee.org>
  • To: Ari Steinberg <ari.steinberg AT stanford.edu>, Eric Womack <eric AT lasvegasdata.com>
  • Cc: sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Discuss] stable/testing branches
  • Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 12:29:30 +0100

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On Friday 26 July 2002 11:19 pm, Ari Steinberg wrote:
> my last comment (probably) on this thread...
>
> At 11:57 AM 7/25/2002 -0700, Eric Womack wrote:
> >But even to say that we will determine if a package is is stable because
> >Debian says it's stable is too much. WE need to test is and determine for
> >ourselves if something is stable.
>
> I'm still not convinced that this is actually what's happening. How much
> testing is really involved before something becomes a part of the
> test/stable branch? It seems more to me like once a version has been
> sitting around for a week or two without any complaints it's automatically
> merged into the test/stable branch. How do we know, however, that it truly
> has been tested, and that nobody actually did have a problem with it? The
> current process, if I'm not mistaken, is simply for one person (Tony) to
> deal with all of this for two branches, but I think it is too much to
> expect of him to say that he has *pro-actively* verified that two grimoires
> work perfectly. Instead, I think we simply designate things as stable in a
> reactionary way - if nobody complains then we assume, and assuming of
> course is not a good thing.

You're correct on all counts. If a spell is unchanged for at least 1 week in
devel it goes to test. If it remains unchanged for another week in test it
goes to stable. It's an imperfect process, but when you consider the
resources and the effort required to achieve perfection it's a good balance.

Much of the process is historical because when I started producing the
test/stable branches we were still recovering from Kyle's unscheduled
departure, and a key requirement was not to eat the time of the newly fledged
section maintainers. That said, the process has worked very well so far.

Here's what I think is required to produce a truly controlled test/stable
branches.

1) Section maintainers must actively test and maintain their spells in all
three branches.

2) A mirror of all versions of source code for all packages.

Without both of these things, the current system is the best available. It
gives us something of value with little extra effort or resource.

Tony
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