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

delayed, fine, for the wrong reasons, no

[Quietti]

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:

1. Release every 6 months, no matter what, like OpenBSD does. If a package doesn't make it to stable this time, the next possible slot is only 6 months away, not 2 years.
2. Allow upgrades to existing packages - or completely new packages - to be released within the release's lifespan, if they are built on existing libs available in this release e.g. if someone manages to get Evolution or Galeon to build reliably for all 11 architectures, using the libs released for Woody, then include it in Woody r1, r2, etc. in 6 months from now.

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.