Why has etch not yet been released?

The long term release goal was about 18 months, which was December last year. To pick a date out of the air, the release managers chose December 4th. Not everyone in Debian thought that setting a release date at all was a good idea. Not everyone had even heard of the December 4th release date; it had been in a few announcements but Debian releases have been getting longer and longer, so when you have a release announcement, no one believes it anyway, so it just doesn't get taken into account.

It's hard to say quite why the deadline was missed. There were a few issues, one of which was the kernel packaging to remove firmware that we had some general resolutions from before; that only managed to get done on January 5th this year. So about a month after we were hoping to release. That, in turn, was a requirement for the next installer release candidate, which will hopefully be the final one, and that will then require about a week or two of testing to make sure it's okay.

That supports some of the arguments that the release managers aren't the ones that need to be funded; it's the people doing some of the work that's problematic - like removing firmware and working on the installer - perhaps we should have dedicated some resources to helping them out.

On the other hand, the release managers do a lot of work on fixing up the actual release critical bug count. What we can see in the graphs tracking these problems is a real improvement from 200 to 100 release critical bugs when Steve was working full time on it, and an improvement of about 100 to 75 or 50 while Andi [Barth] was working on it.

Do you think Dunc-Tank has been successful as an experiment?

There was a definite effect [of funding] on it [etch], and there were some other indirect effects as well, such as the Dunc-Bank project, in which a group of people, mostly from France, didn't like the idea of paying people at all and set up a project that would work with Debian's guidelines and try and improve Debian, but in such a way that Dunc-Tank would fail and wouldn't release on time.

They decided to do some really thorough testing of the release and find more bugs that would then have to be fixed, because if you don't find bugs in advance you can't fix them, and so you might release on time, but with bugs.

So they found the bugs in advance, and said, 'oh, we know about these bugs, and etch can't be released till they're fixed'. This forces us to release a better product, but later, which is what the Debian community tends to focus on anyway.

So while we've had Steve fixing all these bugs, we've also had a lot more being filed, and so I think we've had a real improvement in the QA process and that's from people who specifically don't like the project so it's hard to say if that's a failing or a success, and whether it's possible to repeat that at all.