Slashdot Mirror
Debian Leaders: We Need to Release More Often
daria42 writes "The lack of a new stable release of Debian GNU/Linux since July 2002 is fuelling the campaigns of many candidates for the project's Debian Project Leader role, with many pushing for a shorter and more stable release cycle to stop Linux users heading for greener and more updated pastures."
Try Ubuntu. They have a release cycle of 6 month and the next release due to april is Gnome / KDE. You can even get the preview release now.
Slashdot anagrams to "Sad Sloth"
IMVHO, ubuntu is Debian Done Right.
Check it out - I'm certain that they'd like the help of a high profile advocate like Bruce Perens.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
I can see the need for keeping ahead of security bugs...
Speaking of which... *tap* *tap* is this thing turned on? Is anyone from the Debian security team listening? I've got a security issue here... I've e-mailed vendor-sec (3 weeks ago)... I've e-mailed debian-security-private directly (1.5 weeks ago)... are you guys planning on responding some time this month?
(Yes, I'm entirely serious. Slashdot isn't my preferred channel for communicating with other security teams, but the usual mechanisms seems to have failed, and I figure that there must be at least a few Debian people reading this story.)
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Debian and Ubuntu are currently similar enough that i have yet to hear of this happening, though i'm sure it's possible. note that the ubu dev model is something like this: snapshots of debian unstable every 6 months, with fixes applied and fed back into "vanilla" debian. as such i think that we're going to continue to see them being very similar.
-Leigh
Historicaly, I am the author of Debian's fundamental policy document and did a lot of the early work on their system.
I've paid my dues a few times over.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Newer packages, a wiki full of documentation, a supportive community and nice package management programs (in the development version). Note that the only one of these that Debian can't have at this point is a stable set of up to date packages. Everything Ubuntu does is shared with Debian.
When comparing Ubuntu with other distributions than Debian, things are a bit different. One of the selling points for Ubuntu for me is that it's developed by a community and has a central package repository. It's been a while since I used a non-Debian distro, so I'm sure much of this has changed, but when I used Red Hat and Mandrake, there was either nothing that compared, or it wasn't visible enough. Assuming that other distros have that now, there's the deb vs. rpm issue depending on which one you prefer. The main issue is that you're never considered a second class citizen in Ubuntu. The other distros have commercial versions with special software and updates you don't have access to. With Ubuntu, everything is free, and they've made a commitment to always remain free.
After potato was released, Anthony Towns implemented testing in an attempt to keep testing in a releaseable state always, so releases could occur more rapidly. That helped, but still didn't really fix the problem.
After woody was released, security support and the installer were serious problems that had stalled the release of woody for quite some time, so more effort was placed into those areas to create a working installer along with a decent security infrastructure. That has helped as well. However, it took quite a while for those to be implemented.
Now that sarge is on the verge of being released, people are analyzing the situation again to try to figure out what else should be done to fix the problem. The Vancouver Prospectus is an attempt to solve what have been identified as the problems for etch.
No, as you can see above, specific things have been attempted to solve the problem. They haven't succeeded, clearly, but it's not for lack of trying them. Distributions based on Debian are rather easy to make, frankly, especially if you're going to standardize on a specific set of packages and only support them. It helps as well if you can throw money at the problem and hire people to work on specific problems. Point in fact, none of the not-for-profit Debian based distributions have every actually released a stable distribution and suported the entire stable distribution for a whole product life cycle. They have different goals for the releases that they make than Debian does, which is quite acceptable for them. [Nothing is stoping anyone from taking a specific version of testing, calling it "stable" and supporting it. The fact that no one has should tell you something.]
http://www.donarmstrong.com
Has recent packages (Woody doesn't)
Provides security upgrades (Sarge doesn't)
Is somewhat stable (I believe that Warty is stabler than Sid)
Many packages in Sarge are newer than their counterpart in Warty, and similar Sid has newer packages than Hoary. However these differences are small and unimportant.
Ubuntu has focused on a subset of the Debian archive. The packages in this subset are stable and work well. Furthermore Ubuntu has a "universe" archive that contains most of the packages in Sid. Some of the universe packages are uninstallable due to missing files. This can be bad if you are very dependent on a specific program.