Having the current pair of repositories -- Unstable and Testing (with Experimental on the side) -- is problematic:
- All changes must go through Unstable to get into Testing unless there is a freeze.
Let's add another step between Unstable and Testing; let's call it "Pretesting". Maintainers can submit packages directly to Pretesting. The packages progress Unstable -> Pretesting the same way as they progress Unstable -> Testing with the additional requirement:
- Packages sent directly to Pretesting must be in the same version series as the previous Pretesting package.
This allows the release team simply to put a .so freeze on Pretesting to get it ready for a release.
Proposed by: MikeFedyk