Debian Freeze Process Update

snotty6969 writes: "Freeze Update. Anthony Towns sent in an updated report about the Woody freeze process. We're almost into the last week for uploads of base packages. If there are outstanding bugs you'd like to see fixed, provide patches or upload now. We are also getting into the last days for ensuring that standard and task packages get included in the Woody release. At the moment it looks like a lot of packages will be removed from Woody. Among these are a whole bunch of commonly used programs like gpm, Mutt, CVS, Procmail, Apache and Mozilla. People who can fix bugs in these packages and care about them are encouraged to send in patches or upload fixed packages using Anthony's unofficial NMU guidelines."

Comments

Who needs attribution, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

This submission was lifted verbatim from the most recent Debian Weekly News. I just felt someone should point this out, since the submitter didn't seem to consider it worth mentioning.

No need for alarm...

[HoserHead]

...this, as others have mentioned, is more of a wake-up call to maintainers than anything. Apache _will_ ship with Debian 3.0, because maintainers will make it as bug-free as possible, because they care about it. gpm has already been fixed of most (all?) of its bugs. Similarly, we can expect all of the other major packages to be fixed in the next couple of days.

Don't worry, people. The packages you care about will be in Debian 3.0. (Including mpg321!) We'll make sure of it. :)

Re:No need for alarm...

[Daniel]

Indeed, I seem to recall that in past releases, little unimportant packages like libc6, boot-floppies, and dpkg were among the ones being "targeted for removal if you don't fix them" :)

(feel free to correct me if my memory misfired)

Daniel

Re:That's the whole purpose of a "stable" release

[noahm]

Being "stuck with whatever software versions Debian freezes on for a couple years", as you say it, is actually a Good Thing(tm).

It can be a good thing, for sure, but at some point there's a tradeoff that must be made between stability and usability. For most of the basic internet services (web, mail, DNS), development has reached a certain point of maturity, and you really don't lose much by running a 2 year old release of sendmail or BIND (provided you have all necessary security updates, which Debian makes easy).

The problem is, though, once you start leaving that realm of the world, upstream development happens at a really fast pace, and Debian's release cycle does not keep up. I often cite GNOME in slink (Debian 2.1) as an example of this problem. Slink shipped with GNOME 0.3, which you may recall was virtually unusable and was certainly not stable. The most frustrating part of that, though, was that by the time slink actually shipped, GNOME 1.0 had been out for months! How can slink be considered stable when the software that comprises it is an old development snapshot?

A more current example may be apache 2. It is still not available for Debian (even in unstable), which leads one to suspect that it won't ship with woody. If it doesn't, then what happens to those users who need apache 2 functionality on mission critical servers? If they need to run unstable to get the software they need, then that defeats the point of stable. If they need to fetch the source and compile apache 2 outside of the Debian package system, then that defeats the point of apt-get.

IMHO, it is unacceptable for Debian to not currently have a stable release that includes PERL 5.6, XFree86 4.x, Linux 2.4.x, etc. What prevented the release manager from proclaiming a freeze 6 or 8 months ago? Newer versions of key packages were available and reasonably well tested at that point, and a 1 or two month freeze would have left us with a released version of Debian that was both stable and reasonably up to date.

One of the key problems, I believe, is that Debian does not use any notion of release goals. This makes it impossible to say for certain when a freeze should happen. It's entirely up to the release manager. Obviously it's not easy to have release goals for a distribution, since much of the software you want to package is not available when drafting the list of goals, but even some sort of vague, general release goals would help to provide focus.

Or maybe the problem is just that nobody actually wants to do QA debugging so they keep putting it off until the release manager gets fed up and stops allowing new features to be added until some bugs are fixed.

I don't know...I've been a Debian user for 5 years and a developer for about a year. I am very frustrated with the pace of the release cycle. Another OS I use regularly (FreeBSD, which I use at work) shares Debian's reputation for quality and stability, but they release at least two versions of their OS each year. They've released three versions since Debian released potato. Why can't we do that?

noah

Re:What the hell is going on?

[Daniel]

Why the hell would they freeze just before emacs21 goes in, just before KDE 2.2.2 goes in, just before ALSA goes good, etc etc?


Because if we applied this criterion, we'd never freeze!

Someone's pet package is always going to be about to be released, and will be left in the cold; IMO, this fear of leaving old software in stable is a large part of what historically contributed to long release cycles. (I think the current one is long mainly because we've completely redone the archive/release infrastructure and we're still working out bugs in the new system. That and, sigh, the installer)

Daniel