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Debian 3.0 (Woody) May 1?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the best-gets-better dept.

dex@ruunat noted that this morning, in a message to the debian-devel-announce mailing list, Anthony Towns, Debian's Release Manager, wrote: "I'm becoming increasingly confident in woody's release readiness. So, to go out on a limb: Debian 3.0 (codenamed woody) will release on May 1st, 2002." Congrats to all the debheads putting this thing together. I have a blank CDR waiting ;)

2 of 327 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Version numbering? by rusty0101 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Like anyone else does so?
    Mandrake 8.2, RedHat 7.2, ...

    Release numbers for packaging distributions are, and should be numbered by the people maintaining the distribution, to reflect their own perception of whether the release is a major, or minor improvement over the previous release.

    For Linus and co, the enhancements to the kernel that moved it from 2.2 to 2.4, were minor changes, things like adding USB support, do not warrent a major version number. If the scheduler or virtual memory manager gets a major improvement, that would probably warrent a version 3.0, or so.

    With Debian, the kernel is not the only thing that gets improved by moving from potato to woody. Updates to the user interfaces; Gnome and KDE; many packages, OpenOffice, ssh, and others; as well as the improvements to the kernel, moving from 2.2 to 2.4; suggest that this will be a Major improvement to the Debian Distribution.

    Then again, they may be looking at other distribution version numbers and thinking that the public will percieve Debian 2.4 to be less "market" friendly than Debian 3.0.

    After all, I wasn't in on the decision to version the software, and these are only my opinions. I could be wrong.

    -Rusty

    --
    You never know...
  2. Kernel :Version numbering? by castlan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Which kernel would that be? A BSD kernel perhaps? OpenBSD is at 3.0 last I checked, so that works out, unless you believe that Debian/NetBSD is more realistic.

    Facetious, perhaps, but you fail to acknowlegde that Debian is a "kernel independant Operating System" that is popularly based on Linux. There is nothing stopping debian users from chosing KDE if that is their preferred desktop environment, just as there is nothing stopping x86 users from choosing The Hurd if their hardware supports it.

    Debian has a larger scope then you seem to realize. Distinction from the Linux kernel is the best reason I can see for supporting a Major release increment to 3.0, as otherwise I would much prefer a more conservative path better utilizing the range of our decimal counting system under the auspices of 2.x.

    While I hope my post has contained a modicum of sensibility, I fear that this is not the case.