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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."
I have no problem playing with aptitude from their latest unstable Sarge (it's great BTW), but it makes it very hard for me to recommend Debian on servers to customers when the latest stable release is eons old. Yes, I know there are ways around this... but let's face it, from a customer point of view it's an small image problem Debian has.
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Bruce
Bruce Perens.
As a new Linux user, what I heard from all my friends was, "don't use Debian, use Mepis or Knoppix or Ubuntu." It seems to be the opinion of many that Debian is nice, but it's not worth using a plain version of Debian, because these other distros have built it into something better. At least, that's the impression. So it seems that Debian is losing "mindshare" among new Linux users to a degree.
I think this is good news that some of the potential leadership in Debian has reconized this as a problem.
I've been a Debian fan for some time, but I find I am racking my newly built critical servers on RHEL3&4 just because so many of the Debian packages are 'stale'. In a lot of enviroments, running testing is unacceptable and using stable is to far out of date for the intended use of the machine. We are definatly in limbo as far as Debian installs.
I really hope they pull this together, without Debian the landscape changes dramatically for binary stable systems.
But, the biggest problem I can see is that by releasing early and often it creates a larger legacy code base that needs to be maintained but does not have the resources to do so. You cannot effectly update a server farm of hundreds to thousands of machines to a new version within a short legacy cycle, yet it is a huge burden to maintain the legacy code for any lengh of time.
This is a "once more" new iteration of the same old idea of Debian updating their stable branch not often enough. And as always, I have to respectfully but totally disagree.
... well, since about the Potato release.
For one, people should really understand and see, that not all Linux distributions are just there to suit the newbie (l)users' desktop needs. This is just the attitude people gather while being full-blown Windows users and then fiddling around with some Linux, thinking it's cool and if he can't find his way around, then at least that';s another reason to bash.
Debian's stable branch is just _the_ perfect distro for servers. You can argue with this statement, but I will _not_ listen to home users' hysterical crap about the newest kde/gnome being necessary. There are places where that simply doesn't matter.
Where I spend my working hours very few people use Linux distros on their desktops, really very few, but almost all our servers are Linux based. The two of them where I hve root access are Debians. One is a current stable Woody, being web&mail&db&cvs&related server which I installed last year because the previous machine had a major blowup. The other is a Debian Potato (!) which is the previous [i.e. before Woody] stable branch, which is our dns server, up and working for
No desktop environments, no x, just good stable and reliable code which I trust and - most importantly - _very_ _easy_ to maintain.
At home I use Debian SID for about 4 years now. Updated about weekly, _very_ stable and usable. It has all the desktop fun I need. Most important: it hasn't been reinstalled since the first install just always copied over to the changed machine (about once in a year, I always hand-build my machines ever since I became acquainted with the screw driver), updated the necessary stuff and keep it always apt-get dist-pgrade-ed.
For me, and for many others out there, Debian - and now the quite many Debian-based distros, hey, there are even Debian SID-based distros now (!) - represent _the_ _GNU/Linux_ _distro_. For the others, there are plenty of others you can use and that is exactly why Lnux distro forking is a Good Thing, try not to forget that.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Back in the 20th century Debian was not that old.
My guess is FOSS really took off unexpectingly and Linux became ported to more architectures besides x86 and the Alpha. This caused the folks at Debian to focus on everybody including the atari users.
If a bug was fixed for most platforms but the amiga users (all 15) was still present, then package X would not be updated on any of the other releases. This is whats hurting it.
I hate to say it but the x86, powerpc, and sparc versions should be ahead and have a later version then the others. FreeBSD for example has alpha and powerpc as different tiers of support, although alpha is still pretty stable.
http://saveie6.com/
Personally I think they would be best served by doing a little of each.
The answer is so simple I am surprised nobody has mentioned it.
Trim down the number of "official" packages. Right now there is something like 3000 packages in the debian system. Why not cur that down to a thousand. Take the top 1000 most popular and best maintained backages and call it debian.
The rest of the packages can go into "ports" or "contrib" or something. They would still be there if anybody wanted to install them but they would not hold up release cycles, debian would not guarantee they would work with the rest of the system.
The great thing about debian is that by using stable you are promised that nothing you install will break your system. They can still promise that but just with less packages.
evil is as evil does
If you were running for that Debian Project Leader Role, I would vote for you.
We're using SuSE because we can't use pacakges from something called "unstable"