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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 !
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".
From the article:
:wq
One of the major new features of Etch will be official support for the 64-bit x86 architecture which is becoming increasingly used in servers.
-- Phase 1: Collect under pants Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Profit
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?
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
Don't forget that this year will bring Linux on the desktop
www.lemonodor.com A mostly Lisp weblog
after a few bad experiences with windows i know a family who was glad i wiped windows off and slapped on ubuntu on their computer, i told them to call me if they have any problems, so far no problems...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
> Don't forget that this year will bring Linux on the desktop
Linux maybe, but not Debian. The whole "does not change often" thing may work for some kinds of servers, but on the desktop it's a nightmare. Oh, you want to install the security-critical bug-fix update to your web browser? I'm sorry, that requires a recent version of the widget toolkit it uses, which in turn requires recent versions of three-quarters of the stuff on your system, none of which is available for any distro more than about six months old. HTH.HAND.
Debian, whatever else it may be, is not a desktop-oriented distribution.
(And anyway, the days of Linux on the desktop are drawing to a close. We've been there, and we've done that, and it was okay, but now we're coming to the days of BSD on the desktop. Nietzsche is dead already, and NetCraft is up next.)
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
To release a distribution 18 months after the previous release is still a long time, but compared to the time it took for Sarge to be released it's extremely fast.
The problem with Debian right now is.:
No,any version of Debian isn't really suitable for newcomers.
I'm sure Sarge is great as a server, but if you intend to run X then you're gonna be stuck with apps from almost 2 years ago (unless of course you use backports and that's a whole other story).
I alternate between Debian Unstable and Ubuntu (depending on which is the least annoying at a given time).
Scott
©20014 angrykeyboarder & Elmer Fudd. All Wights Wesewved
There's a big difference between Ubuntu and Debian. Ubuntu is the Debian-based product of a commercial company, Canonical, and their marketing talk for Ubuntu consists of half-truths (=half-lies) and hiding problems from users is part of their their policy. Debian, on the other hand, is a distro made by a non-profit organization developed by volunteers. Debian (unlike Ubuntu) stands on its own feet, it's not based on any other distro and its policy is NOT to hide any problems. Debian supports officially 4-5 times more packages and many more architectures than Ubuntu. Making packages to build on more architectures helps finding and fixing bugs that would otherwise be hard to locate. Being based on Debian, also Ubuntu benefits from the high quality of Debian's packages. Ubuntu has some very skilled developers taking care of the packages in "main" category but there's hardly any criterion for selecting the MOTU's who maintain the packages in "universe" category. In Ubuntu, there's no security updates for the "universe" packages.
There was recently a protest among Kubuntu developers about not getting enough support from Canonical and the main Kubuntu developer (the only one who's getting paid for the job), Jonathan Riddell, quickly wrote a blog entry trying to tell people that there's no quarrel between Kubuntu devs, although there clearly was (and still is, AFAIK). http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/1917 Riddel also wrote posts to public forums telling people to "move along, nothing to see here" when these forums informed people about the quarrel. This is just one example of the Ubuntu policy that tells the employed devs to attempt to hide any problems instead of discussing them openly in public. Also Ubuntu's marketing talks consist of half-truths that try to benefit from Debian's good reputation whenever it's appropriate but in general they try to hide the fact that Ubuntu is not really an independent distro that could stand on its own feet. Ubuntu's marketing talk also tries to hide the fact that bug-fixing and security updates are poorly managed in the "universe" packages. I'm sorry, but I refuse to buy Ubuntu's used-cars salesman's marketing discourse. Ubuntu just has too many problems that Debian doesn't have.
It seems that many people don't understand Debian's development model. Some people say that Debian unstable is a good choice for desktop systems. No, it isn't. Debian unstable is the development branch where all new stuff is first introduced. Saying that people should track Debian unstable is like saying that you should always track Ubuntu's development branch instead of using its stable releases. Debian unstable is UNSTABLE (the name should give you a hint about its unstable nature) and it's SUPPOSED to break every now and then because all the main development that goes into Debian happens in unstable. Debian unstable is for developers only -- it's not suitable or recommended for normal users.
Debian testing is the current development branch for the next Debian stable. Debian testing is quite suitable for everyday desktop use -- Debian unstable acts as a kind of bumper where all the serious bugs hit first and where they're also fixed. Once the packages migrate to Debian testing, they have already received some real-world testing that ensures that they're ready for the everyday use. Applications in Debian testing are usually almost, although not quite, the "latest and greatest" versions, because new packages first need some testing and buf-fixing time in Debian unstable. But at times when development goes smoothly, Debian testing can be quite up-to-date. If you use Ubuntu's stable release (that isn't updated for six long months) and if everything goes well in Debian's development (like it has gone lately), then Debian testing should have newer packages most of the time when compared to Ubuntu.
Let's compare some package versions in Ubuntu's latest release and the current Debian testing using the DistroWatch pages for these two
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.