Debian-Project - Release Goals

Release Debian without Goals

This has been proposed by Ian Jackson and Anthony Towns. Manoj Srivastava quotes and writes this:

There has been a proposal brewing where instead of taking slink at some point and freezing everything in it, we maintain a ever changing pre-release distribution that consists of packages with no bugs of severity important or higher, and which have been deemed stable by the maintainer; (the proposal is more detailed, and has protocols for moving from Incoming --> unstable --> staging area --> pre-release).

The idea is that we can periodically freeze the pre-release (which should be relatively simple, as the whole reason for this scheme is to minimize outstanding bug reports); this allows for us to release on schedule, and caters to the fact that packages have release schedules that do not synchronize with Debian releases.

If this goes as planned, we should be able to release; wait 2 months, freeze, test a month, wait two months ... a rapid release cycle would make a package missing the deadline less onerous.