Why are 4.8.80 packages already out in the wild?

[Jonathan Riddell]

To get some more info for this discussion I asked about Gnome

They put tars on their public ftp server on the Monday and release on the Wednesday

09:49 < Riddell> didrocks: doesn't that lead to lots of comments on news sites and user forums "gnome 3.2 is released, why don't I have packages yet?"
09:50 < didrocks> Riddell: no, never saw that for the past 6 years (when this process was built upon)

09:56 < Riddell> didrocks: what about bugs found by packagers?  kde has about 5 days for packagers to go "err this app needs an unreleased libfoo" or "it doesn't compile with gcc
                 10.1"
09:57 < didrocks> Riddell: that's another case where we told GNOME what went wrong (the release manager is doing the same at the same time as well and talk to the maintainers),
                  this lead to release a .1 when a real error occurs. If the new nautilus needs the new glib, we just wait for the glib tarball even if nautilus tarball is already
                  posted

For Ubuntu releases (which has slightly different issues than an
upstream release) we mirror the release images about 12 hours before
release to get wide mirror coversage at announce.  This leads to lots
of news articles and user comments that it's released even though we
might pull the images if a last minute issue is found and causes
excessive load on our servers.

For Kubuntu KDE packaging we use private build archives as Scott says.
I'll generally watch for Dirk and Sebas to start doing the public
release bits then move them over to the public archives.  But it's a
bit messy and leads to rushing.

I don't have any perfect answers for this and don't think any one way
is what we should copy.

Jonathan