Hannes Hirzel <hannes.hirzel.squeaklist at bluewin.ch> wrote:
[SNIP description of Debian's pipeline]
> So it seems that this roughly corresponds to our schema of
> alpha-beta-gamma but with releases overlapping and that we have four
> stages instead of three

No, I don't really think so.

> a = alpha
> b = beta
> g = gamma
> f = final
> 
> version
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ----> time
> 3.5      aaaaa bbbbb ggggg | fffff  .......                             
> 3.6              aaaaa bbbbb | ggggg fffff .....                       
> stable
> 3.7                      aaaaa | bbbbb ggggg fffff ..........           
> testing
> 3.8                              | aaaaa bbbbb ggggg .........          
>  unstable                   
>                                  |
>                                  |
>                                  at a given point of time there are
> in parallel three (or four) release streams: unstable, testing, stable.
> 
> Am I missing something?

Well, first of all - stable doesn't go through a alpha-beta-gamma-final
cycle at all.
It just sits there quietly, perhaps gets a few bugfixes but that's it.
And then BAM, it is replaced with a complete new version (when testing
is declared as the new stable) over night.

Testing does indeed go through the cycle - just like we do in Squeak.
But unstable has no such cycle - as Jimmie said its always in
development. If I understand this correctly that is.

The main difference compared to Squeak is that we have typically lacked
"unstable". And of course, we haven't used packages and releases of
those either.

Another difference is that in Debian - which is package centric - I can
actually run stable and then pick cherries from testing. Or run testing
and pick cherries from unstable. We can't do that in Squeak. Yet... SM
is aiming for that capability in the end.

regards, Göran