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Debian Etch to be Released in December
lord_rob the only on writes "According to a ZDNet article, the next release of Debian should be available in December 2006. From the article : 'The date represents a dramatic improvement in the regularity of Debian's development cycle. Etch will be shipped only 18 months after the previous release, version 3.1.'
...when I see it.
when I read this post....
Don't quote me on this.
It's after 3.1 so it has to be Debian 95 !
Duke Nukem Forever finished? Mac's are finally on Intels, and Debian is releasing another release within that doesn't take 10 years??
Is the world ending??
Anyone? Bueller?
The opposite of progress is congress
Debian's QA process takes a long time, but it's nice not to have to go through a dist-upgrade every few months on servers that need to be left alone and 'just work'.
What? Debian Etch is going to be released already? Damn. Not too long ago, I was playing with Woody (hey, stop giggling), and more recently, with Sarge (I said, stop giggling, frickin' school girls).
Debian goes way to fast for me! Argh! I can't keep up!
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
Thus, no matter how bug-free the software is, it will still be losing some "stability" if people are forced to upgrade on an 18-month cycle. I understand that there's some pressure to compete with fedora and ubuntu, but there still is debian testing and unstable, which do offer the cutting-edge software. However, there should also be pressure to compete with red hat, which does provide 3 years of support for their server OS. And if debian can't compete with that, then it's no longer "the universal OS".
Disclaimer: I'm assuming that they plan to drop support for sarge upon the release of etch. If they do plan to continue supporting sarge for a full 3 years, then any grievances listed here are null and void.
Badass Resumes
Officially supported!
in /etc/apt/sources.list and enjoy the bugfixes and security-updates for another 18 months.
They're very good about "oldstable".
So is it Debian 3.11 for Workgroups or did they make the full leap to Debian 95?
:)
There was a comment on the article with Vista falling behind few days ago where someone said even Etch would be release before Vista... guess he was right!
I'm not suggesting Debian shouldn't have long releases schedules (it ensures a rock-solid product), but only that they consider what it is doing to the userbase.
"Sure there's porn and piracy on the Web but there's probably a downside too."
Surely this is a sign of the end times! Seriously though, it's nice to see Debian responding to the requests of what seems to be the majority of their userbase. I know I have avoided Debian because they seemed to do releases on a geologic time scale. I admire their insistance on quality, stability, and security, but most people would like to have some modernity as well. Here's to hoping they manage to strike or more widely appealing balance.
I see some people complaining (probably out of jest) that this release is too fast.
.. but .. ehh .. if you're up to that task for most tasks - you can just as well roll your own company distro and keep that stable. Not that much more work.
What a load of bollocks.
I've been working as a server administrator for 8 years now. Debian was quite okay from '98 until about '00. After having newly upgraded from slink to potato I found that the mysql installation was so old that developers wouldn't touch it at all. Upgrading it in a nice way was not exactly an easy thing to do - as just COMPILING a newer version was hell - due to it depending on things that was too new for this 'stable' distro.
This is only one thing. Other things are year-old releases of things such as snort. What good is it? The simple answer is that it's no good at all. Some sorts of software NEEDS to be bleeding edge. Think of it as running a years-old version of an antivirus engine. Sure, you can try to hack the signature files to be able to detect new viruses, but some kinds will just "slip past due to the detection engine". Same with snort and various other goodies.
Debian is quite simply releasing too slowly for most needs. Sure, I'm pretty sure it's good enough if you can hand compile all the libraries you need for newer software which is in business demand
Oh, and if anyone is wondering, I'm working at a company where a huge lot of our installed base is 5-6 year old distros, with our add-ons. We compile libraries for breakfast. But for a distribution to be based on that assumption? Bah I say. It's bollocks! And people who claim that it's a good thing? Get real.
Congratulations to Debian if they manage to get the release out this december.
When a release date is announced for a stable release of Debian, it's rarely respected. I say rarely because I'm a young user of Debian. I started using it when woody was about to become stable. I don't know if previous release dates were more accurate for potato, ...
Congratulations, folks, seriously. I'll be looking forward to that big apt-get!
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Man, you're the genius behind slashdot's moderation!
Now take your time while I stuff your mother.
I've been an Ubuntu user for a while now and I've really enjoyed the experience, though I've had some annoying experiences with glitchy programs. When Debian Etch is released, I'll be apt to get it! To see if it's more stable than Ubuntu. So far the glitchyness of Ubuntu is the only thing about it that annoys me. Maybe Debian will be like Ubuntu without the glitches.
It might be interesting to see them compete with Ubuntu. Dapper will probably be more up-to-date (judging from my experience with sarge), but Etch will probably be more stable. Of course, I probably won't find out. because I'll be running edgy.
/# cat /etc/debian_version /# cat /proc/version
2.2
Linux version 2.2.19 (root@matrix) (gcc version 2.95.2 20000220 (Debian GNU/Linux)) #11 Wed May 28 23:36:14 EDT 2003
I'm still on Potato. It's been stable and online for the last 6 years (as I recall upgrading to potato from slink). Give me a good reason to upgrade being this is my web/mail/dns/ftp box.
ps: cpu info shows AMD K5 75mhz
While it used to take a long time for Debian packages to become stable, it did provide end users with a reliable and secure system. By shortening the development lifetime between unstable and stable, it is clear that there will undoubtedly be more security flaws and thus more updates to the stable branch. A more prudent question to be asked here is what could the Debian team have done to dissolve some of the pressure to shorten developement time. The solution from my point of view would have been to give users a little more control over what branch to initially install. While I'm well aware of the expert mode provided by the Debian installer which does provide the option, I don't feel as though its suitable for most first-time users. Thus the usual result is that first-time users end up with a system based on the current stable release. While the current stable release has the advantage of being well.. stable, it doesn't contain all the bells and whistles that most first-time users are looking for in a desktop environment. This is the point where the users usually complain about the lack of feature in the stable release, and are unfortunately told that they have to perform an entire system upgrade in order to receive the features they desire. Its this frustration that has ultimately lead to the pressure to push out a new stable release in half the time. But one must wonder what kind of reaction the Debian community would have seen, had users simply been given the option to begin with.
In this mail (near the end) http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2003 /08/msg00010.html
we can read that the planned release date for sarge was december 2003 (it was released in june 2005).
So, maybe 2008 for etch..
If you don't want to use the older software found in stable, use testing! It's really not that unstable (that's unstable's job). As has been said already, Ubuntu is essentially Debian Etch + a polished (brown) Gnome.