ANN of new versions of Mercurial

[Matt Mackall]

On Mon, 2013-01-07 at 13:05 +0100, Paul Boddie wrote:
> [*] When asked to give Ubuntu releases a test to see if the bootloader 
> works, to provide an extreme example, I often wonder whether Canonical 
> thinks its demographic is a bunch of tinkerers who don't do anything 
> more than try out the latest release, as opposed to people using the 
> software to do actual work. I also wonder whether they have any testing 
> infrastructure to eliminate basic deployment issues at all. There's only 
> a limited potential in asking people to bear a significant cost 
> (disruption and potential loss of work) in order to save a much lower 
> cost to the project.

This is an perfect example of my point. Canonical has about 500
employees, but there are something like 20 million Ubuntu users (most
paying $0 each). There are many more than 500 models of laptop out there
so it's obviously an economic impossibility for Canonical to test even a
tiny fraction of the hardware configurations their users use. So they
absolutely need people like Tess to help them.

Let's imagine a scenario where .1% of machines are incompatible with a
new bootloader. If they have 1000 Tesses, they might catch it before
release. 2000 Tesses and they're much more likely. But Earl is pretty
much irrelevant. If 20 million Norms randomly upgrade once every two
years, 100k Norms are going to randomly pick release day to upgrade.
Without Tess, we'll have 100 Norms with machines that won't boot. If
we've got 100k Earls updating too, now we've got 200 broken machines on
day one. Not an improvement.

This is basically the story of Mercurial, but scaled up by a few orders
of magnitude.

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.