Thanks! After a very cool party which I'm sure made some people angry because of the noise at FISL6.0, sarge was actually released and no one will make fun of us =D. lol

I know people are requesting at least a week to rest from all this and that some other people are already discussing wishlists.

It looks like another discussion has already begun at debian-devel about the Vancouver proposal, too, and I've seen lots of positive comments and attitudes from some people (porters, even) saying that they're interested in discussing the proposal and fix its bugs instead of simply throwing flames. It looks like many people understands the proposal as a 'we only want to support arches a, b and c'.

I'd really like to see people cooperating on fixing eventual problems on the Vancouver proposal. It seems clear to me that we do have problems with our porting infra-structure and that some stuff are causing problems and delays. Making sure our day-to-day work has got quality is perhaps more important than guaranteeing the quality of the results alone, and that's the main goal I see on the proposal.

Another important thing I think we should be considering seriously is on setting a release date. A release date helps in a number of ways. You can plan what are the main transitions you want, what main version upgrades you want, etc. You also replace the feeling 'we won't be releasing anytime soon, I can delay this a bit' for 'we will be releasing in 9 months, I better get what is important for me ready or at least started'. You also end the 'maybe we have some 2 more months, let's try to push a new version of $stuff in?' dilema.

Just as an example, if we knew we would be releasing on June 20005 the GNOME Team could probably have targeted GNOME2.10 as the target GNOME version for sarge. The team would not have done the enourmous work it did on GNOME2.8 while 2.10 was in preparation; focusing on GNOME2.10 even before it was released we would have it ready on time.

My own pet project, gksu, would have had translation updates sometime ago if I knew when we would be releasing. The 'we won't be releasing anytime soon' feeling made me delay this 'cause I had more interesting stuff to do - until the release target of may 31th was announced. Then I tried to do all translations updates and some simply didn't have time to come in.

Now, if we know we're going to be releasing on June 2006 we know we can target GNOME 2.14, which should be released around march that year. We can start packaging GNOME 2.13 on experimental as soon as it comes into existance and move it to unstable and finish its debuging process sanely.

I'm sure we can come up with other good advantages this would have. ABI transition planning, not increasing RC bugs by not adding new upstream versions close to the end of the release cycle, not making our future stable too old for not blocking development because 'we can freeze anytime'.

I'd really like to see this being considered seriously and discussed with sane arguments instead of flames =).