[csw-maintainers] stable release?

[Philip Brown]

On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 10:08 AM, Ben Walton <bwalton at opencsw.org> wrote:
>
> Your point is taken, but I'm more interested in defining our criteria
> for what separates 'stable' from 'snapshot' for the purposes of
> advancing the discussion.  When we've agreed what our basis of quality
> is, ...

ok. here is, approximately stated, our historical definition of
quality for stable.
(which technically should be archived somewhere in the oooold
archives, but here 'tis again :-)

A package qualifies for stable, when ALL of the following conditions are met:

1. package has been publically released for more than T time. (T
usually defined as 30 days)
2. package has no significant bugs filed against it
3. All its dependancies also meet criteria 1 and 2.

This sounds simple. But in practice, it has in the past, involved a
large chunk of packages sitting in "current", not actually making it
into a particular date's "stable" release.
Then, the more packages that are excluded, then make a potential for
other packages being excluded because of dependancies, which make for
more headaches for the stable release manager.
Not to mention the additional headaches of going around bugging
people, "Hey, fix your bugs so we can have your package released to
stable"!

This is not a popular position to have, to put it mildly ;-)