Debian discusses vendoring—again

Posted Jan 13, 2021 13:27 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Debian discusses vendoring—again by Karellen
Parent article: Debian discusses vendoring—again

The big difference is in timing. GTK+ and QT+ have different versions, sure. But upstream supports these. There are parallel releases — but these are supposed to be parallel-installed.

And the whole discussion is about things like Jenkins where two versions are not supposed to be installed and where about three months (but we don't know how much, exactly) is supposed to be called “Long Term Support” (I wish I was joking, I'm not).

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Debian discusses vendoring—again

Posted Jan 15, 2021 6:25 UTC (Fri) by murukesh (subscriber, #97031) [Link] (1 responses)

According to https://www.jenkins.io/download/lts/, they seem to have settled on a 12-week cadence. But considering they say the normal release cadence is weekly (!), 12 weeks seems like a very long time in comparison (comparing with, say, Ubuntu, where the ratio of LTS/normal support duration is 60 months/9 months ~ 6.66).

Debian discusses vendoring—again

Posted Jan 22, 2021 2:48 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

You couldn't release anything weekly. There are just not enough time to find and fix problems in any new features.

The most you can promise if you “release” weekly is “hey, it passed our automatic testing and therefore we hope it's not completely broken”. That's not a release. 20 years ago it would be called “alpha version” (not even “beta”: beta is supposed to be tested by some testing teams before release, not just pass CI bot). I'm not even sure that thing which they call “an LTS release” can be compared to “normal” stable release of XX century software which you can actually trust.

The really strange result of all that activity is the fact that as “release cadence” shortens the actual, tangible, changes become less and less frequent. But resource consumption and number of bugs skyrockets. Simply because nobody can understand how the whole thing is supposed to work — and the amount of band-aids applied to pile of existing band-aids which ensure that the whole thing doesn't crash immediately upon startup is just endlessly grows.

As Hoare (original inventor of Quicksort) said: there are two ways of constructing a software design — one way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.

What we are looking on in that pile of weekly “releases” and pile of “containers” is the end result of application of 2nd principle.