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'.""
How many people does this actually affect? I realize that their are probably some Alpha and Sparc owners on this board and in the community but how many of those people are actually running Debian? Are they really comtemplating dragging out their already elongated release schedule because of two platforms that the vast majority of Debian Users dont care about?
I dont particulary care for Debian myself - but this all seems rather stupid. (1) Because they shouldn't have waited until the last minute to break the news (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?
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. 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.
J
I love idealists not because I am one, but because they make life bearable for pragmatists such as myself.
reading the tone of aj's message, he seems to be blaming various members indirectly for the delay. surely if he is the "woody release manager", he:
a) wouldn't have let these issues which have been known for months only crop up now.
b) should have known earlier than the day before to announce the delay.
so if you consider the delay of woody to be a failure, i wouldn't blame the anonymous (yet cited) individuals who checked in code late. i would blame the process that resulted in these events.
I remember waiting for potato. There was no announcement about the release date, but a daily statistics of release critical bugs was published on debian.org. Often you could read a sentence like this:The number of release critical bugs is on the rise again.
I honnestly don't mind it if Woody is a few weeks late from the ETA, especially if it's about making the build more consistant between all architectures and to ensure the security patches will be uploaded in a timely manner.
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. Meanwhile, at the moment, Galeon and Mozilla don't build cleanly on all platforms, not to mention XFree86 4.2 ...yes, Branden explained that he must first smooth the process for all architectures and I agree with him, however...
What makes Debian support by makers of non-free packages so absent is because Debian stable distros are always 2 years behind everybody else, in terms of what version of glibc, XFree or kernel the stable distro is installing with. There are two solutions I can think of for that:
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. Nobody that needs Linux in a production environment can afford to wait 2 years for those to be released, at a time when they are just upgrading to Woody from their already much deprecated Potato. When it comes to that, the solution will be to crossgrade to Suse or Red Hat, if a desired package is not available the day Woody makes it to stable and becomes a priority upgrade on everyone's TO-DO list; Debian will be no more in yet a few production environments, if it looks like it's gonna be obsolete at birth again, the same way Potato was.
As for those who feel like saying Blah! Just point your APT sources to unstable, you'll always have the latest!, don't.
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.
Then unstable is, as its name implies, unstable; I've often had computers become partially incapacitated for a few days, because some new package was uploaded without its updated dependencies, making APT stop the upgrade process right after unpacking a few packages.
The solution to the perpetual Debian release lag is simple: release always, release often. Allowing new packages based upon existing libc or xlib to be released within the lifespan of a distro - not just bugfixes and security patches - is a must, at the very least.
Software is not supposed to be about how to work around a useability issue. - Ken Barber
In one of the last XFree stories, the Xfree maintainer mentioned that he will not treat non-x86 people like second class citizens.
Its more than that; from Branden's (Xfree86 maintainer) posting...
In woody, we support 11 architectures: alpha, arm, hppa, ia64, i386, m68k, mips, mipsel, powerpc, s390, and sparc. For how many of these machine architectures do Slackware, Mandrake, or Red Hat have 4.1.x, let alone 4.2, available? [emphasis mine] XFree86 themselves don't test or prepare distribution tarballs for several of these architectures. Debian is the de facto portability laboratory for XFree86 on Linux. Sure, I'll grant you that a lot of people, the kinds with the overclocked Pentium 4's and the latest GeForce card, really don't care about portability, or supporting architectures they've never heard of. But portability is important to me and it's important to Debian. I refuse to treat non-i386 users like second-class citizens.
Now that's class, and that's why I'm going to kiss a little backside and give all of the Debian developers/maintainers a big virtual pat on the back and say "thanks for all of the work you guys have done, both on Woody and in Debian in general."
Jay (=
(A perfectly happy Debian user who doesn't mind one whit that Woody will take a few more days...)
Led Zeppelin's "Physical Graffiti," a double LP that is deffinatley one of the best works of the band, was delayed something like 8 weeks for the cover. That most have sucked for the Zepp fans in 1975.
Here's the catch: It had the most expensive cover ever made to that date. And it was soo damn cool (an apartment building that had pieces of paper with differnt pictures in the windows of the building that you could slide around to change. On the front AND back)
I don't know if that's a good analogy, but... hey, anything for a good time!
Da comp cant tell u da emotional story.It can give u da exact mathematical design,but whatz missin is da eyebrows. -FZ