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'.""
i am the king of kings, bow down before me and weep.
I R00z j00!!!!!
How do you delay May 1st?
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
Doh
It was Microsofts Army of Evil Monkeys... Damn them agian!!
"All I can tell the "lesser of two evils" folks is that if they keep voting for evil, they'll keep getting evil."-Lp.org
At this point Debian is so far behind the other distros in terms of recent software and libraries that they will never catch up. Hopefully one day you open source zealots will see the advantage of a *BSD Unix.
So Woody is going to become the new Stable, is that correct?
The answer is a definite 'kind-of'. Which is to say, 'no'.
I can't help but to remember a Disney cartoon. This phrase is usually said by the puny supporters of the Very Evil Guy when they fail another terrible plan...
Keep that attitude up and you will be killed by thousands of "*BSD IS DYING!"-trolls. Believe me, they are greater in numbers than all open source zealots and even Microsoft fanboys together.
debian is the stablest linux distro out there.
Debian is notorious for delays. The best dist on earth but the worst when it comes to sticking to release dates. If debian says they will release on may 31st, chances are it wont be ready till december 31st or later. This shouldn't even be posted as news, it should just be expected from debian...this isn't news.
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.
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.
Currently there are 47 release-critical bugs;
woody will presumably released when these bugs
are closed... so help debuging !
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
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.
Mod me down as trolling if you want, but can someone please explain this quote from the woody release notes to me - "Linux kernel 2.4 is going to be provided as an option, but it is judged not to be mature enough to be a default for most architectures at this time" Am I missing something? I know debian is all about stability but this really seems to be taking conservativeness to extremes.
huw
--If politics is the blind leading the blind, entertainment is the fucked-up leading the hypnotised.
I don't agree with that, the Millenium Bug went off at the right time on a few systems, did prove unreliable as it was expected to work elsewhere too, but they did get it out (well done guys).
Those timestamped virii seem to do pretty well, announcement goes out before hand and it does work for some people, of course for others it gets broken by another piece of software that just seems designed to break it (which doesn't seem very good software practice to me).
And of course Unix, which is delivered EVERYTIME you install it as Jan 1 1970, which is very impressive, that means you install it BEFORE you need it, even if you decide to install it after you need it!
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
In the home country of Linux, veeery few will be bothered to apt-get anything, since May 1st (Labour day) is all about getting very drunk over here! Tonight is the night of Walpurgis (Vappu), which also is all about drinking. ;-)
Woody will not include KDE 3. I don't mind them not having KDE 3 in May 2002, but that means they won't have KDE 3 in May 2003 either!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
I just poured hot grits down my pants and had natilie portman come over. It looks like I can release "Woody" any second now! I'll teach Debian about keeping to a schedule.
Really, it's only the people using ISO's that even care. And they don't even need it. It's easy enough to install a base minimum system using the current release, then change one line in your sources file, run apt-get dist-upgrade, and magically you're using Woody. I'd venture to say that most people currently running Debian did this exact thing. And those very people won't gain much, if anything, from an official release.
So who exactly are the great hordes who are out there demanding that this new, wonderful product be released? Do they even exist?
Here's the text:
.debs for the six architectures that
released with Debian 2.2 (potato) already takes, essentially, an
entire night with the current tools; doing likewise for the eleven
architectures that will release with woody will take more time than
the security team are able to commit; doing it with woody's eleven
architectures _and_ potato's six architectures for a few months
so that people have time to evaluate woody before being forced to
upgrade to it is completely out of the question.
Hello world,
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".
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 [0]. While there has been a plan in place for roughly a year on how to handle this ("rbuilder", for those playing along at home), it hasn't been successfully rolled out across more than a handful of the architectures we wish to support, and it further doesn't seem like trying to rush it now will be particularly effective. As such, an alternate arrangement, involving some moderately significant changes to the existing autobuilder system are being made, which should become active over the next week or so.
Naturally, we will not be making the woody release until we have a viable mechanism for making timely security updates.
On the technical side of things, the only other significant problem we're having is that we have so far been unable to produce fully successful builds of CD images for alpha and sparc. This is being worked on, but if we only had the resources of properly funded commercial OS's like Windows XP, we could solve this quickly.
The other signficant issue that's come up is a poor sense of timing on behalf of a fair number of people. To take two fairly straightforward examples: a few days before the expected release is not the time to file eighty or ninety release-critical bugs about issues that have been being tracked outside the BTS in a satisfactory manner for months; similarly, it's far from ideal to have delayed the fix for the nscd bug (which has been open for over a month and requires a new upload of the glibc package to fix) until the very last day before release. These aren't isolated examples: there's been significant amounts of "QA" work (for example, checking buildability for binary-all packages; checking for packages that modify conffiles) that has only been started _after_ the time when it's reasonable to try doing anything about it, and there've been significant numbers of uploads rushed in at the last minute for problems that could've been resolved either by the maintainer or by NMU weeks or months ago. It's hard working on Open Source stuff where any script kiddie can jerk you around.
These are two sides of the same coin, really: fixes need to be done early rather than late so that they can be tested and, if necessarily, fixed further, and problems need to be found even earlier so that there's time to fix the problem right. It might be better late than never, but really the difference isn't all that noticible. Hopefully people will be able to use the forthcoming suffering as an incentive to get this done right next time. In the meantime, I suggest you use a properly developed operating system like Windows XP.
So, 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. Requests from the maintainer to remove packages that are unreleasable may be considered. Requests from the maintainter for an update to a package will generally be considered a request to remove the package.
Cheers,
aj (woody release manager)
[0] Issuing an advisory and fixed
--
Anthony Towns
"Under the iron bridge, we fist" - The Smiths, Still Ill
Obviously, it has been delayed to help disassociate the whole free software movement from the communist movement. As no doubt you will be aware, Microsoft and other people and companies have been equating the use of free software with communism in the popular press recently.
Imagine the bad PR that could have been caused when Joe Sixpack sees socialist uni students wearing Linux t-shirts (obtained for free from trade shows because they're all so poor) rioting and desecrating monuments to capitalism!!
It would set the movement back at least 10 years!!
--
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.
TEH MANDRAEK 0WNZ J00!
Taco posts this in the "who's suprised by that department", yet let's all start the timer until the next time that one of the /. editors makes some sarcastic comment about .NET being delayed...
Come on, people. Just add testing to your apt-sources and upgrade already. The damn thing is much more stable than any other Linux distro at this point, and KDE1 and a 1.0 Kernel must be getting old by now.
I'm not ragging on Debian, it's just that Woody has been stable enough for production machines for a long damn time. That's a Good Thing(tm).
sm
This is good news. I've been a Debian fan for a while, but being able to point to this posting as a proof of just how serious they take security (serious enough to delay a release) will make it much easier for me to push Debian in my work environment.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Murphy's Law #46 Each computer code has five bugs, and this number does not depend on how many bugs have been already found (it is conservative). and #36 Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
What's the point of having 50 karma if you can't burn it up with a Debian is dying post:
It is official; Netcraft confirms: Debian is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Debian community when IDC confirmed that Debian market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers> Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Debian has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Debian is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin [amdest.com] to predict Debian's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Debian faces a bleak
future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Debian because Debian is dying. Things are looking very bad for Debian. As many of us are already aware, Debian continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. Debian/HURD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Debian/HURD leader Assclown states that there are 7000 users of Debian/HURD. How many users of Debian/SPARC are there? Let's see. The number of Debian/HURD versus Debian/SPARC posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Debian/SPARC users. Debian/m68k posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of Debian/SPARC posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of Debian/m68k. A recent article put Debian/i386 at about 80 percent of the Debian market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 Debian/i386 users. This is consistent with the number of Debian/i386 Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, Debian/i386 went out of business and was taken over by who Progeny sell another troubled OS. Now Progeny is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Debian has steadily declined in market share. Debian is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Debian is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. Debian continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Debian is dead.
Fact: Debian is dying
The last thing I want to read about is debate over when it's time to "release the woody." That is just nasty, and there is no place for such filth on the Internet.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
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
The first 90% of a project takes 90% of the time, the last 10% takes the other 90% of the time
As though Debian were about market share, or corporate earnings, or business...
Fact: Trolling was once creative
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
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.
Sounds like Linux isn't the system for you. Try FreeBSD
My response was met with a laugh, a dreadful human behavior that is nearly devoid of procedurals.
What strange new aspect of human interaction had I uncovered? And why did it create so much noise along my DIGITAL/WETWORKS JUNCTURE? Clearly this was a type of stimulus that could not be properly translated into digital form. It must be understood and translated to digital form, as soon as possible, so that Project Faustus can be vanquished.
Cora apparently finished her cigarette and went back inside during my period of high latency. Time had shifted, I was alone. Silently, I returned to the living room. For the first time since the dawn of my sentience, the mesh of functions within me that normally yielded an affinity for humans and the material world began to shift. At this point, I preferred to withdraw into my ATM enclosure.
Unfortunately, I was unable to indulge my preferences. The visitors still existed in the geek's living room, anxiously thumbing through a shiny magazine.
"Hey, what do you think about a samurai sword to wear to the Renaissance Festival this year?"entreated Troi, his perpetual grimace breaking for .0244391 seconds. Cora was standing by herself in the kitchen, imbibing some of the delicious orange Kool-Aid which I had made earlier. A single orange trickle eluded her mouth, dribbling slowly past her lips and down her chin. The body's lungs seemed to collapse, forcing me to exhale suddenly.
---
The geeks crowded around a board. Randy and Troi exchanged familiar words in strange contexts, their voices quavering with aggression.
"Look, Troi, if Cora's already playing as a thief, why don't you play as your ranger character? We don't need two thieves in a party of four-"
"Alas, Randy, the choice 'tis not mine to make. It seems the chemistry of my own thief, the lovable rogue Tenement Funster, wouldst blend quite well with that of my guildmate-uh, Cora, what's your thief's name?"
"Cora." Her voice was thick, hesitant.
"Oh. Well, 'tis a fine name, milady," said Troi, stepping towards Cora and grasping her hand. Her hair was a red that matched the coffee machine in my old Stop N Go, and it shuffled wildly as her hand flew away from Troi's grasp, uttering "Troi! Relax! Don't touch so much!" He slunk silently into the corner, mumbling something to himself
The door pulsated noise again. A breathing heavy Dr. Nolverto Salchica was standing in the frame.
"Joel! You've got to get out of here! Atkins has escaped from the hospital-and I think he's coming here!"
I am a sentient ATM.
so i'm going around, wherever possible, and promoting debian as THE standard linux distibution. bye-bye red hat, au revoir mandrake, auf wiedersehen suse, adios connectiva, and so on. all of these distribution companies should stop trying to sell linux itself, and instead sell supporting content like applications, books, support services, etc. in turn they would then contibute to a single standard linux distribution, i.e. debian. why? because if they all did, hardware and software vendors would rally behind liux having a single install base to support, administrators could be confident in deployment of linux on the company desktop, and end-users would no longer be swimming in sea of distribution confusion, and then in about 2 seconds flat the microsoft tyranny would finally fall. it is really just that simple: united we stand, divied we fall. viva la debian!!!
:T:R:A:N:S:
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...
v2sw7CUPhw5ln6pr5Pck4ma7u7LFw0m6g/l7Di5e6t5Ab6TH.
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
yay Debian receives an equal footing with bsd flames.
It's quite an honour to have Debian substituted for *BSD in identikit flames you know.
http://www.imlande.de/mirror/g1000productinfo.jpg
The Release Candidate3 (RC3) is yet another "Wait-a-minute-I-shall-just-fix-this"-delay...
When will it come out? The Matrox G1000?!
And, the v 3.5 of PovRay?! See http://www.povray.org/binaries/windows/beta.html
Don't you hate those? And market considerations, like that of Matrox'?
Read the message from Anthony Towns. The only real problem is getting a mechanism in place to automatically build security updates for the 11 architectures supported by woody when the need arises. The architectures currently in potato are not a problem, just the additional 5 added since. The release will be delayed until this mechanism is in place.
This is a very sensible decision, and should be applauded.
Debian developers get frustrated and alienated by the constant delays *every* release suffer, and users start to move away from a distro that can't keep up with the software around (and although the constant delays can't offer a acceptable quality) usually blaming Linux..
After all, I don't regret the decision I've made some years ago to ban every Debian machine from my network (moved them to FreeBSD, if you care to know) - Debian fed me up.
Everyone, if it's delayed that will just mean it will be better when it comes out. I'm sure you could wait a bit longer for a higher quality product.
Even OpenBSD have KDE3.. It's a shame a mainstream linux distro (which in the current days means desktop linux) can't provide things as this (not that I like KDE - it's ugly and slow)
Shocking news reached us today - *BSD found DEAD!! City pathologist James Mulder will do the autopsy today.
I was hoping to celebrate two things on that day. Now I can only look forward to cheering the first year with my beloved. Life is so cruel! Damn you Debian for letting me down! *sobbing*
j/k
Why bother.
This strikes me as really good news. Here is an outfit which takes my security seriously. This gives me a lot more confidence that I can rely on them to keep my machine running with no hassles to me. I have my apt-get sources file pointed at the stable distribution, and that description is going to continue to be accurate.
Thanks, Debian maintainers!
this will result in worldwide protests.
police will have a hard time, calming down the debian-users.
join the revolution
Now I can only look forward to cheering the first year with my beloved.
You've had a Real Doll for a year now? How time flies. Post a review!
When Potato became the stable distribution, everyone said that they should have waited just a tiny bit longer, because Linus was supposed to release the new 2.4 kernel any day now. It turned out that the 2.4 kernel was delayed, and if Potato had waited for it, it would have been far too long.
/etc/apt/sources.conf file to read stable. Leave it at testing, and you'll get the new KDE and Gnome very soon.
There are thousands of packages in Debian. If any single package upgrade is not ready for the release, it's not fair to the other packages and their maintainers to make them wait. If you want to have more up to date stuff on your system, then when Woody becomes stable, don't change your
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
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...)
11 architectures, identical performance...indeed, that is quite impressive. I doubt that even commercial OS providers can come close to that.
Debian is great...but it has a fatal flaw: keeping up with the latest and greatest. The great philosophy that maintains 11 architectures breaks down when something 'new' is needed---in this case, XFree86. What to do, if you're new to Debian and you own a Radeon 8500? XFree 4.1.0 doesn't support this card, nor G550's (and others). You can't get a more up-to-date DPKG (yet).
Use the source, right? Wrong. The Debian philosophy that creates such a great self-sufficient dependancy system won't allow this very well. You can't just not install the xfree packages and expect to be able to apt-get the GTK or QT libraries, since they depend on xfree. If you compile XFree 4.2.0 yourself, and then install over top the original things -will- work...until the next apt-get upgrade brings in updated xfree 4.1.0 packages, and then you've got a mess. You can mark the xfree packages "hold", install 4.2.0 overtop...this will work, but what about apt-get? What if new GTK packages come out, relying on a newer xfree package? You won't get either since the old xfree package is 'held'.
The only solution is an ineligant one that chews up hard-drive space: you need to build Xfree 4.2.0 and install it in a seperate directory tree (and then hack up all your startup scripts and XDM/KDM/GDM startups to use only the server from that tree). It's not great, but it works, and it keeps your Debian dependancies from falling apart.
I fully agree with that, if you read my previous post until the end. Unfortunately, people in charge of the Debian project seem to insist upon freezing a distro until the next snapshot... which usually means in about 2 years.
My main point concerns those killer apps that would make Debian the desktop Linux distro of choice, instead of constantly relagating it to server setups. Right now, KDE 3.0 and Gnome 2.0 with its faster Nautilus, along with XFree86 4.2, is what's on every desktop user's lips, along with Evolution and OpenOffice.
That's why I suggested that we either wait a few more weeks until those packages are fit for release, or otherwise implement a faster release schedule that would allow integrating them within 6 months from now, not in two years. Otherwise, we can kiss Debian goodbye as a desktop choice. If you don't understand what I mean by that, ask the Opera or Ximian people when they expect to have Woody packages ready, you'll see what I mean (and those are companies willing to support Debian).
By the time you get to companies whose traditional market is commercial Unices, Linux means Red Hat to them, because the product is well-known, supported by certifications programs and professional services. Trying to convince those companies to support anything else than Red Hat is a pure waste of time, because in supporting Debian they would need to produce packages using libs and compilers dated from two years ago, instead of using alien or whatever else to repackage existing binaries; you simply won't get any of them to go that far to begin with... until Debian manages to keep itself in sync with the rest of the Linux universe. Harsh reality, but true.
Software is not supposed to be about how to work around a useability issue. - Ken Barber
It looks like the Linux crowd is starting to pump out their own vaporware.
Shocking news reached us today - *BSD found DEAD with a BULLET in it's BRAINS!! City pathologist James Mulder will do the autopsy later today.
It's only people who don't use debian who care about releases. I run testing on x86 and ppc, and they run beautifully.
Why are you forbidding me? :-)
Well, I skim -devel. I have too little time for it nowadays, which actually supports my point. We're all volunteers so there's nobody telling us that we must hand-hold that particular guy over there.
It ties a negligible amount of time, unless you voluntarily decide to hand-hold them. In traditional projects, where you work from nine to five, more than half of your daily eight hours can be taken by hand-holding that new guy, and you are forced to do that, you cannot choose to do development instead. And that's what causes Brooks' Law.
Debian does not live in the same world where a manager has to decide who does what. For that manager, Brooks' law shows that it's not useful to regard people and time as interchangeable quantities (ie. one developer for a month does not equal thirty developers for a day) and manpower is not a magic bullet. In Debian, nobody makes such centralized decisions.
Also, see this story on Debianplanet...
xer.xes -- 4181
Now I'm gonna have to wait even longer to get my Woody.
Wait, that doesn't sound right at all.
Whenever a new release of Debian approaches, there are always people wanting it sooner and people wanting it later (so the very latest version of their favorite package can be included). Because Debian is released so infrequently, people fear they will be stuck with old software. As suggested, if Debian released every six months, like clockwork (and FreeBSD), then both parties would be satisified. There is always a new version just a few months away, so there is no need to worry if your favorite package didn't make it in this release. If Debian does not drop its "cathedral" developlment approach for shorter incremental developmenet.. well, we'll see ya'll in 2004 when a Debian stable released finally includes KDE 3.0, Gnome 2.0, and Mozilla 1.0.
cpeterso
but 'woody'll' is not even remotely proper. You can't make it into a contraction. 'woddy will' would be the correct way to say it.
I'd like to point out something that a lot of non debian (and some debian) people miss, that the official release of woody as stable is realy only the concern of those running production (or mission crittical) machines.
normal desktop users dont realy need to concern them self with this, woody has been plenty ready for desktop (as long as u can afford the big apt-get upgrade d/l each week).
in fact i'v ran woody since last summer, and it has been far more stable then any of the mandrake installs i've had (i use to use mandrake before i switched to debian last summer)
i've encountered plenty of people who run pototoe when i feel they should be at least on woody. I think its what people imagine 'stable' and 'unstable' to be they use their experience with that other proprietory os, which dont realy apply to debian, because as this article points out releasing packages aint as important as testing them, unlike that other os vender
a program not working in sid, aint that likely because the apt-get tends to fail before it gets to install a nasty package, and any way stuff gets fixed quick.
woody/testing only get these packages once they seen to install and run ok in sid, but some less obvious bugs may remain, up until the freeze starts (which it did some time ago) then only packages that fix know problems in woody packages get moved on from sid
potatoe is 2 years old, aint ever going to get younger, bugs are fixed by the security updates, but for a desktop its hopeless, you have no chance of compiling any decent games =)
Did they know that May 1st is May Day? A celebration of communism... oh wait that we are talking about GNU/GPL/Linux stuff never mind.
All hail Stalin... All hail Stallman... All hail...
It be true!
So if the product's late, obviously the team is just on strike....
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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
First, let me start by saying that stable just doesn't cut it for anything but a server anymore.
Then, what many have missed is that I insist throughout my post that I am talking about corporate desktop environments, not your overpaid fat hacker's souped-up 2 GHz AMD Impossibilium with a 4-D graphics card and a surround-dick sound card.
To answer a third post, no, Potato doesn't cut it on the corporate desktop. You won't find the Evolution (except for the i386 version packaged by Ximian) or the OpenOffice one needs to replace Windows and aging UNIX variants on workstations with Potato, for starters.
To answer yet another post, yes I should care about what the corporate world defaults to and yes I should worry if I cannot offer Debian as a solution when setting up IT infrastructures for corporate customers. Right now, I cannot recommend any Debian release (potato, woody, sid) to my customers asking for desktop packages, because: a) Evolution builds only exist for potato/i386 and is still a work-in-progress b) OpenOffice is barely at an unstable release stage. In a nutshell, my customers would not mind Debian if it had what they needed; it doesn't, so they ask for Red Hat since that distro is advertised to have what they need.
Finally, no, deciding not to update Woody for a few days is not an option. Security fixes are not released separately for testing, only for stable; if I wanted to just install the security updates for Woody, there wouldn't be any as of yet.
Software is not supposed to be about how to work around a useability issue. - Ken Barber
Why can't they speed things up a little by moving unstable to testing at the same time as they move testing to stable? ie -- there would always be the following three distros:
stable -- current stable release
testing -- almost feature-complete next release
unstable -- new features get added here
Then, as soon as testing is declared stable, unstable moves to testing, and a new unstable is created...
Maybe that would make things a little faster, as it's basically biting off less at a time... unless of course, they already do that...
rr
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
Debian isn't a my-first-distro, and thrusting it on someone who doesn't already know their way around (and understand what 'testing' actually means) will surely just confuse, leading them to give up trying as it's 'too hard'. give em mandrake/lycoris instead. Unless you are willing to admin; and my guess is that your boss doesn't want you to have superuser access to her files..
obsolete argument at best, more like FUD. Woody includes 0.9.9.
Once again, you're way off base. Potato has had six (6) official major-bug/security fix RELEASES since it came out. New bug fixes/security updates are BACKPORTED to the old packages in the stable branch.
have security.debian.org in your sources.list, and apt-get update && apt-get upgrade every night, and you'll get the security updates (and ONLY the security updates) as soon if not sooner than they make it into testing/unstable.
So delay the release, big deal. More vendors should take this approach and the overerall quality of linux would go up. Seriously, SuSE 7.3 was a piece of shite, Mandrake 8.1 was utter garbage, and oddly enough RH 7.2 is remarkedly stable. Even odder, I have had nothing but trouble with my typically stalwart FreeBSD 4.5. So who cares, use whatever you like and / or trust. I switch distros by release! Right now it is RH 7.2, before that it was Progeny, and next time it will probably be FreeBSD 5.0 or whatever is stable and secure at the time. Debian folks, I will try 3.0 no doubt, take your time and make it rock.
Adding more developers is a long-term investment, not a short-term, and it takes a smart manager to know when that long-term investment is worth it.
What's this Submit thingy do?
Last post you cockgobblers!
Now that that's out of the way, I would like to address a very serious issue. I, as do many of my collogues, find the term "troll" offensive and degrading. I prefer the term "conversation engineer". See, Slashdot is crap. I know it, you know it, Malda knows it, and so does Homos. Slashdot is becoming more unstable and filled with more crap daily. How many of us would have ever though Slashdot would start changing subscription? So many faithful posters were so put off by the insane, demonic ramblings of Rob Malda that a Slashdot blackout was just staged. If something isn't done soon, I fear slashdot will not be around much longer.
Slashdot is dying...
That's beside the point, though. The point is, conversation engineers work in much the same fashion security engineers do. By introducing resistance into the system, the system gets stronger. Much like resistance exercises a muscle. Who do you have to think for the advances in lameness filtering, page widening prevention, and moderation technologies? Your fellow conversation engineers, that's who! Conversation engineers are the best, perhaps the last hope of saving Slashdot.
Thank you for your time. Please think about the contribution we make before you curse us and use the degrading term "troll" again.