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Sarge is Now Frozen
JoeBuck writes "Steve Langasek has announced that Debian Sarge is now frozen. He produced a schedule that would lead to a Debian release at the end of May, though I would expect it to slip somewhat. I'm glad that the long wait for a Debian release will soon be over."
most of our team left Debian a while back. While its stability is still a strong point, many other distros are very proactive about putting out a stable, quality product these days without the rediculously long timeline....
K
I realize a lot of the posts here are in jest, but what's wrong with being a little slow on the release schedule? There hasn't been a release of Microsoft's desktop OS since 2001 (wow, comparing Debian to Windows XP - kind of like comparing __insert appropriate metaphor__).
As long as the developers are still committed to maintaining the distro, I think we should all be thankful that Debian is so conscientious in it's release policy.
Of course, I don't think Sarge will get all of the Debian desktop users back. I hope that community is fine with its role of being a server distro.
Open Source Sushi
I realize a lot of the posts here are in jest, but what's wrong with being a little slow on the release schedule? There hasn't been a release of Microsoft's desktop OS since 2001 (wow, comparing Debian to Windows XP - kind of like comparing __insert appropriate metaphor__).
There's a word in yiddish - that word is l'havdil (it approximately means "pardon the comparison")
So you're asking "What's wrong with being a little slow to release. L'havdil, Microsoft hasn't released since 2001."
With sarge being frozen, and the release nearing, I am finally glad i'll be able to move back to debian. Ubuntu is nice, but debian gives you much more control out of the box.
What is keeping me off of debian right now is the lack of Xorg, and the official support for the amd64 arch. Those were both things that were a "coming after sarge" deal, and now it looks like all that waiting will finally come to an end, I hope.
:(){
Paluminum.net
I think people expect more out of open-source projects. Since you can, in theory, have many many times the manpower of a corporation that thrives on closed-source development (such as Microsoft), many people assume that quicker release cycles should follow. While I agree somewhat with that notion, I don't think the lack of frequent releases is indicative of laziness or any other such nonsense that I see from time to time on Slashdot and other forums. It's not laziness; it's a commitment to stability and order. While I tend to stick with more mainstream Linux distros for enterprise tasks, I have colleagues who swear by Debian's stability, order and ease of maintenance.
Frankly, Debian has always come across to me as a more enterprise-ready distro than, say, Gentoo or Mandrake (going off of personal experience). The kind of people I know who use Debian aren't the ones looking for the latest X.org packages so they can play Doom III or have terminal transparency. They're the kind who don't give a rip about what version of KDE comes stock, as they'll be using Debian mostly from an SSH term anyways. I think efforts like the Ubuntu project are a more appropriate approach to a modern desktop-ready Debian than pressuring for more frequent release dates from the Debian Powers that Be.
"You and your third dimension."
The original party line was that Debian's X team was waiting on a modularized X.Org source tree.
Debian's X team now is in a holding pattern until Sarge gets out, though I don't remember ever seeing this stated directly. For instance, in this message to dri-devel, Branden Robinson clarifies that Debian will package Xorg in the same fashion as XFree86 if the modular version isn't ready yet.
The Debian X Faq states, more or less, the same thing.
You don't see "No Xorg till Sarge releases" anywhere because none of the X team members are fortune tellers. I would imagine that NOW, with the freeze underway, they'd be happy to say it.
http://necrotic.deadbeast.net/svn/xfree86/trunk/de bian/local/FAQ.xhtml#debianplans
they are NOT going to move before sarge release the x.org issue simply happened too late in the sarge develeopment cycle (remember debian supports a lot more than just i386/powepc/ia64/x86-64) which they must ensure that all the crucial system stuff behaves on.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I'm currently using Debian Sarge on several server and seriously considering a move to another distro.
2 85361
My reason for switching has more to do with how Debian drops the ball on important server-side development packages.
For example, the mod_fastcgi package for Apache 2 (libapache2-mod-fastcgi) has had 0 outstanding bugs and it has been 146 days since the maintainer requested help moving it from unstable into testing.
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=
Think about it...146 days since the maintainer asked for help moving a package with 0 outstanding bugs from unstable into testing. And the package is a library required for one of the fastest growing web application frameworks (ruby-on-rails)...
Sheer lunacy. If Ubuntu proves itself to be appropriate for server-side deployment, then I'm moving on and bidding farewell to crap like this.
Pity, Debian used to be the best distro.
X.org is already stable in 11 architectures? Who did that?
Its relatively easy to do it just for i386 (It's the original target). As I know most of the efforts to port X to most architectures comes from Debian.
Ubuntu and others have i386, AMD64 and PowerPC basically. They make a great work. But doing it for 11 architectures and with the stability that Debian does...
I can't understand you. I think you are just to ignorant to understand.
I disagree. At this point, I find woody too old to even be usable on servers. What's outdated? Well, let's see: the MTA, whichever it may be; the web server, whichever web server you may prefer; the SNMP packages; the various FTP servers; OpenSSH; Kerberos; OpenAFS; PHP; perl; gcc; MySQL; Postgres. The list could go on. Not only are these packages out of date, but they're horribly out of date, in some cases multiple upstream stable releases behind. I run a number of services on woody boxes, and for most of these services I've had to backport packages or use something like backports.org for the important packages, often including their dependencies. Having to do this kind of thing sort of defeats the purpose of a "stable" release, IMO. Just because a machine is a "server" doesn't mean it doesn't need modern hardware support or up to date software. Maybe it's OK if it's just a simple little shell/static HTML server sitting in your closet for you and a few friends to use, but when you start trying to run an enterprise on Debian stable, you find it rather limiting.
noah
Do know know what the resources of Microsoft even are? 40 billion/year buys you a lot of developers, *full time*. 40 billion/200k (counting overhead, etc..), gets you about 200,000 developers. This is much more than Debian - about 900 part time, plus another 50,000 part time for upstream (guesstimating). Very few full time developers in Debian or upstream.
Most people working for Debian or have software packaged in Debian are not writing it for money. Money is a big motivation factor especially since you need it to live.
The *resources* of Microsoft dwarf Debian, Redhat and Suse combined. Sorry, but that's reality.
With a shorter release cycle, Debian would lose one of its advantages: You can set up a server and receive security fixes for years without having to upgrade. For some purposes, this is a good thing.
On the other hand, for other purposes, this is bad. What Debian needs is a "semi-stable" release (not as volatile as "testing" but released more often than "stable").
Claus