Slashdot Mirror
Debian May 1 Release Delayed
andrew writes "Anthony Towns, Debian's Release Manager, posted this message regarding the status of the expected May 1st release of Woody made reference to in this slashdot story. In short, he says: "So, it's April 30th (for most of the planet, anyway), which probably means folks are beginning to get mildly curious about whether woody'll actually be ready for release tomorrow. The answer is a definite 'kind-of'. Which is to say, 'no'.""
If you would have read all of the article, you would have noticed that they were also delaying the release because they didn't have their procedures ready yet to release security updates on woody and potato at the same time. I think we should applaud them for remembering how important security is (Maybe msoft should take note?).
Last time (2-3 weeks ago) I tested the Woody ISO:s you could choose a couple of different kernel-images for installation, three of them were 2.2.X images and one was with 2.4.18. I installed with 2.4.18 and it worked like a charm. I don't think there's anything wrong with the ability to choose. If you install it with the default 2.2 kernel you can apt-get the 2.4.18 packages and have that kernel installed instead.
Quite frankly, I fail to see what's news about it. There has never been a formal announcement of a May 1st release deadline, just a message in which the release manager went out on a limb: "So, to go out on a limb: Debian 3.0 (codenamed woody) will release on May 1st, 2002. Actually, as always, it'll release when it's ready: if we find that the software doesn't meet our expectations on April 30th, you'll find me on the ground writhing in pain with leaves, bark and wood all over the place [1].
(2) Because its a rather frivalous reason. Alot of other distro release x86 first and Sparc/Whatever later on. Why can't Debian do that?[1] I'm going out on a limb, remember."
Because Debian doesn't treat non-x86 users as second class citizens, and because the developers already have enough versions (stable, testing, unstable) of their packages to worry about without different archs having different versions.
Oh well I'm sure they will get it worked out in due time - until then I'm sure more and more people will begin to think of Debian as a dead distribution rather than as an active one.
Debian's release is going to be dead alright. Dead stable that is, which is exactly the goal of a Debian release. Anyone who gets a woody from a daily fix of "latest and greatest" versions can run woody (testing), or unstable and doesn't have to care about releases. Releases are for folks who require stability.
They really don't have anybody to blame but themselves I mean they are the only ones shipping a distro that still uses the 2.2 kernel. There are sound reasons for shipping with a 2.2 kernel as the default kernel; check the archives for the debian-boot and debian-cd lists. In any case, 2.4 kernels are supported, just use the "bf2.4" flavour of the installation system.