Poll: finding the right package promotion time

[Maciej (Matchek) Bliziński]

2014-08-20 13:30 GMT+01:00 slowfranklin <slowfranklin at opencsw.org>:
> It seems there wasn't any other technical argument for that other then "that's what Debian does".
>
> So short of technical arguments I found it interesting to get a picture what others might find an appropriate amount of time. My gut feeling was 2 weeks it too short.

There is probably a tradeoff involved. if the delay is too long, users
of the testing catalog (probably most of our users) will get an
unnecessary delay in getting the benefit of new packages. This also
applies to security fixes, unless they are pushed directly to testing
by the maintainer. This is what Yann did with OpenSSL previously, but
not now: recently updated OpenSSL packages still have 3 days to go.

If the delay is too short, users won't have enough time to spot a
problem with a new package. But we don't know how short is too short.

The problem is we don't have enough information to evaluate that tradeoff.

If nobody uses unstable, the delay value doesn't matter. Ideally users
would run unstable on some of their machines, and testing or stable on
the rest. But we don't know if they do or not.

In general, if you want to optimize the delay, I'd suggest getting
more information rather than relying on the gut feeling. Maybe
educating users about the relation between unstable and testing is
more important than any particular value of the delay?

Maciej