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Debian Project Votes To Postpone Policy Changes
jonoxer writes "A little while ago members of the Debian project voted to make changes to the Social Contract. As previously reported on Slashdot, the end result looked likely to be a delay in the release of Sarge, the next Stable edition of Debian, until 2005. But on Saturday Debian developers voted to postpone the changes until after Sarge releases, effectively affirming that the changes need to be made but making a pragmatic decision to not let the next release be delayed as a result. The official voting page doesn't show the result yet, but it's been semi-officially announced."
are you talking about social contract or postponing it? how can postponing can be bad for debian desktop usage?
for the former, Debian is very strong all over the world, so if debian starts enforcing social contract, most developers will have to fallow Debian rules in order to penetrate to debian repository. finally, just for you information, new debian installer is much better than knoppix hd installer.
This is good news. Alas, it will still have been too long when Sarge comes out.
I've heard others elsewhere suggest that there should be a server distro and a desktop distro in Debian. I like the idea personally.
Yes, I know about testing and unstable. I use unstable as my desktop. However, I'd like to have reasonable recent software without dealing with the constant moving target that is unstable. I'd like to see a desktop version that is updated every six to twelve months and that isn't held to the same standards the server sub-distro would held to. I think unstable updates too often. Stability is also a factor. Yes, unstable is relatively stable, but you have to keep close watch on incoming packages to make sure they don't break something.
This would also allow for docs to be made for the majority of Desktop Debian users who don't seem to be using stable.
Apt is "available" on other distros, but it's NOT the same apt that debian has.
Quite simply, because a deb gets through more QA before release, not to mention that the standard debian packages have the following advantages:
1) most debian packages manage config file changes by the user, and try to merge them(at least in unstable, not 100% sure about Sarge as of yet)
2) Debian's userid/tcp-ip ports management through dpkg catches more errors and allows better handling for special situations(like development boxes running several different kinds of web servers, for instance), that might just be my personal experience however(although the amount of work I had to perform to get 6 different types of webservers on a single debian box was lower than on any other distro I've tried by a large amount)
3) I take exception to your "What's the point of getting Debian stable, when it is so out of date?" statement. Until you replace stable with unstable, I read that as an oxymoron. Stable software was out of date last month, it is however, secure, usable, and third parties have had months to work out their alphas and beta phases, so now you can use it with your 12321322123112 machines with no worries that a bug hasn't been found YET. Not that Debian is IMMUNE to bugs, but up-to-date software IS rife with bugs(and if you're lucky, you don't wait too long for your fix). But with debian stable, that's confusing the security patches, with the next generation release, and that's bad juju.
The branch of Debian I notice you don't mention anywhere, is testing, which just might do what you think is Stable's job. For the rest of us, I'll go pray that some 3rd parties get a clue from Debian and start producing Stable branches of their software that break less often than their Unstable ones.
Sometimes I wonder if it would be better for Debian to call the stable branch "frozen" instead. It'd disspell a lot of the myths about how Debian is 4 years behind the times.
:-/
But then again, some of the Debian core developers think the world should conform to them, not the other way around...