Debian 3.0r6 Released

Polkan Garcia writes "The Debian group has released an update to the 'Woody' distribution of the popular GNU/Linux OS. From the site: 'This is the sixth and final update of Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 (codename 'woody') which mainly adds security updates to the stable release, along with a few corrections to serious problems. Those who frequently update from security.debian.org won't have to update many packages and most updates from security.debian.org are included in this update.' More good news: r6 is the final update of woody, the new stable release is coming."

Comments

Re:I think it is a good idea not to update quickly

[Elf-friend]

XP wasn't eighteen months obsolete when it released. Yet that is just about how far behind everyone else Woody was when it shipped. Some people were willing to cope with that, since the project leaders promised a short turn around on Sarge (IIRC, they said they were aiming at under a year). Instead, here we are three years later, with Sarge still somewhere "out there" on the horizon, with packages even further behind than Woody's were when it released. I don't feel like waiting until 2008 before I can migrate to tools that other users have now.

An additional point about the XP comparison: nobody shipped software requiring Windows XP in 1999, but that's exactly what happens with Debian. When the Linux version of Neverwinter Nights shipped in 2003, I couldn't install it on Woody, (and still can't, AFAIK) because of Woody's ancient version of gcc. I need Sarge to run that on a stable version of Debian. Here we are, two years later, and still it won't run on Debian stable. It will run on nearly any other distro's latest stable release (and on BSD), but not Debian stable.

The Debian release cycle just keeps getting worse, and I see no end in sight for that. An update every three years might well be fine if the updates weren't falling further behind with each one.