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."

Comments

Re:Duh...

[Bruce Perens]

It's ready to go, as soon as Debian makes their release.

Bruce

Re:If it's stable, it doesn't need to be updatedOf

[Pandora's Vox]

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

Re:this just in...

[dondelelcaro]

Okay. So, again, why did it take three releases to realize something was wrong?

It didn't.

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.

you and other Debian people have thrown up your hands and said, "augh, look at this mess, it's huge, complex! We can't possibly fix this mess!

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.

If it's so hard to make a useful distribution, why did we see a veritable explosion of distributions (some of them based off Debian) in the time Debian hasn't released a single stable version?

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.]