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'.""

Comments

No problem

[realnowhereman]

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? :-))

Re:Alpha and Sparc wont be available...

[reaper20]

Alot of other distro release x86 first and Sparc/Whatever later on. Why can't Debian do that?

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 ... not many people can even name that many to begin with.

Woody is already great, will be even better

[dilute]

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.

Woody is practically stable now.

[Daniel]

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