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'.""
Delay of a release date is always a terrible thing, especially for the poor release manager, who, in this case, sounds like things got a little out of his control. Perhaps it's the peril of working on free software, and having volunteers instead of cubicle drones.
;p
Of course, the delay will net the Linux community something positive - a better Debian. Well, maybe not for the l33t d00ds out there who can take charge, and manually bonk around and get all their own security updates... but for the sysadmins, and the desktop supporting IT people.
What I'm wondering is why games are often the most delayed. If anything, a patch to a game won't be the most terrible thing you could do. But Neverwinter Nights, Duke Nukem Forever, oh, and that steaming John Romero pile... Every Blizzard game ever made! Hmmmm. Maybe they don't want us to have so much fun too fast.
I'm expecting to see a lot of 'Debian sucks, it's out of date before it's even released', but I think this is a good thing. Releasing a distribution before it's ready can be disasterous (RedHat's gcc 2.96 anyone?)... I'd rather have a working, secure, stable distribution a few days later than have a highly experimental one with all sorts of hidden defects right now.
I never really expected woody to go on May the 1st but still am obviously disappointed. However, getting over my own selfish wish to have new toys to play with - this demonstrates why debian is good. The guys preparing it have to deal with the same problems every other distributor deals with, except they seem to be obsessive about not releasing shoddy work just to meet a deadline. Given the enormous pressure to release they must be under from the community I reckon that takes guts and they should all be commended for it. (Doesn't stop me being desperate for woody though does it? :-))
Carpe Daemon
Why? Is it that project management and programming skills are two incompatible skills for a human brain? Is it that everyone try to hype their project by making people wait a little longer? Is it that `cal' has an undiscovered bug? Is the world made this way to please som obscure and annoying god?
I guess it's a mix.
Roses are #FF0000, violets are #0000FF, all my base are belong to you
Alot of other distro release x86 first and Sparc/Whatever later on. Why can't Debian do that?
... not many people can even name that many to begin with.
Debian supports _11_ architectures - a few weeks ago a friend of mine dug up an old sun he had in his basement. We installed Woody. It works exactly the same as it does on my x86 machine, that's awesome.
In one of the last XFree stories, the Xfree maintainer mentioned that he will not treat non-x86 people like second class citizens. Now, I partially agree with you, I'm an x86-only person myself, but think about it, 11 architectures
For most purposes, Woody has been pretty stable for months. All this new date means is that "Woody" becomes the officially released "Stable" Debian distribution.
Debian is a little behind because they insist that all software be packaged and configured in a consistent way. It makes for a more stable and upgradeable system.
Debian has high quality standards, which contributes to these kinds of delays.
Trading off a few weeks of bleeding edge currency for stability seems well worth it to me.
There have been several pieces of software which have been relased and then patched within weeks of the release... infact, wasnt XP one of those products?
As long as the delay is reasonable, and there are good reasons to delay (which I'm sure there are) then dont complain!
debian are doing us all a favour by not releasing something their note sure of quite yet
I wouldn't be so sure of that. You could run testing rather than stable, for one thing. Also we've made significant improvements in the project's infrastructure (the stable/testing/unstable split with mostly automated propagation from unstable to testing; good autobuilders) which significantly increase the chances of "woody+1" being released within a much shorter timeframe than potato->woody (which also was lengthened by the legal and technical resolution of crypto-in-main).
The problem is, many people HAVE to run testing because stable is too old. It's not a serious issue on my home PC, but I can imagine trying to get my boss to switch to Debian and telling him he has to use a "testing" distro because we need a web browser newer than mozilla M18. Or, worse, having to go to "unstable" because some security update didn't get into testing. If, in fact woody+1 is released faster, that will help a lot. Stable would still be old, but much more useable.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
NOTE: THIS IS MY PERSONAL INTERPRETATION OF EVENTS AND NOT AN OFFICIAL STATEMENT ON BEHALF OF DEBIAN!
For people who didn't read or failed to comprehend Anthony's message, here are the relevant parts:
On the upside, woody itself is ready to be released. The only outstanding
changes that need to be made are the standard security fixes that need
to be made throughout the lifetime of stable anyway.
Unfortunately, that's exactly where we've dropped the ball: the security
team presently don't have the resources to handle security advisories
for woody.
...
the final automatic run of the testing scripts was today, and will
be reflected in the next mirror pulse. From this point, we'll have
manually approved security updates to some packages, and very little
else, until release.
This translates to the following: woody is now being treated as if it were a stable release. The only thing that it doesn't have at the moment is support from the security team.
The reason it is not being released as stable is that it is significantly harder for the security team to support than potato (due to almost-doubling the number of architectures), and "over the next week or so", technical solutions to this problem will be implemented. If you can live without this for a while (I don't know how long this will take to resolve, but it sounds like a few weeks is an upper bound), you can install woody now. Otherwise, you might want to wait a bit.
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
some of the speed issues are rather maddening. Consider: I work very closely with the debian maintainer for
nano, in fact I'd say we are friends. He has done his best to get a particular nasty issue, in fact the problem was annoying enough that it required a fix upstream (on my end). But even though two official releases have gone by since the fix was put in upstream, it may not in fact end up in the first release of woody, four months later. I have used debian for probably 5 years now, but I have to wonder if source distros like gentoo have the right idea about making the user decide how to compile his or her package which severely cuts down the burden on the package maintainers. I guess it all comes back to how to balance the burden of upstream/package maintainer/end user...
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Otherwise, if we're gonna wait a few more weeks, we might as well give KDE 3.0 and Gnome 2.0 (not to mention XFree 4.2) enough time to slide from unstable to testing and be included with Woody.
That way lies madness: those are your pet projects, but someone else might want a new version of Apache or gcc, or the new debian-installer system, or...
There's always going to be something that's "almost ready" to be in the next release. The solution is to make the next release happen faster, not to introduce an indefinite number of incremental delays.
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
What I do mind is Woody being delayed, only a few weeks from when packages like KDE 3.0 and Gnome 2.0 would become stable enough for inclusion.
Just because the software is stable enough for inclusion doesn't mean it's ready to be released with the rest of Debian.
For example, a stable version of the Apache 2.0 series was released several weeks ago, but it's not going to be included in woody. Compliance with Debian policy and integration with the rest of the Debian system take time to get right. In the case of Apache 2.0, I believe there are changes to policy regarding virtual hosts that are necessary before it can be included.
While testing is almost sufficiently stable for a production environment, it is a constantly moving target that would need to be upgraded every couple of days; this is simply impractical for a production environment, nobody has that much spare time on their hands at work.
Just because testing is always being updated doesn't mean you have to follow it every couple of days! If you're happy with what you have, then keep on using it. If you need a new version of a package, then just pull the package that you need. There's absolutely zero need to upgrade if you don't want to.
If you want consistancy across a group of machines, then pick a day and declare that day's version of testing to be your locally stable version of the distribution.