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Debian Etch to be Released in December

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the regular-releases-makes-for-happy-users dept.

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.'

11 of 78 comments (clear)

  1. I know the name of it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    It's after 3.1 so it has to be Debian 95 !

  2. Damnit! by Professor_UNIX · · Score: 3, Funny
    What the hell is with releasing a new version so quickly? I just installed Sarge on my new web host and was hoping to get at least 2-3 years out of it as stable before I had to upgrade. Shit.

    /no, I'm not kidding.

  3. an improvement? by croddy · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Sure, it's an increase in the frequency, but is it really an improvement? Are people really clamoring for an update over sarge?

    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'.

    1. Re:an improvement? by RangerRick98 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Poor Debian. When they don't release for years upon years, people complain and poke fun at them for being so slow. When they pick up the pace, people complain they're releasing too often. (Yes, I understand it's not the same group of people in both cases; I just find it funny.)

      --
      "You're older than you've ever been, and now you're even older."
    2. Re:an improvement? by zaguar · · Score: 3, Insightful
      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'.

      I assume you're referring to Ubuntu. Ubuntu does NOT require you to dist-upgrade, it is your choice. You WILL be supported on Hoary and Dapper with security releases for years. It is entirely unneccessary to upgrade every couple of months for a server. Find something, and stick with it.

      --
      "Sure there's porn and piracy on the Web but there's probably a downside too."
  4. Re:AMD64? by colonwq · · Score: 3, Informative

    From the article:
    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.

    :wq

    --
    -- Phase 1: Collect under pants Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Profit
  5. Re:Let me be the first to say... by Hellboy0101 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What people have to understand is that Ubuntu, for all it's goodness, is pretty much a polished over version of Debian Testing. If you want a shiny new OS, create a cron job to run apt-get dist-upgrade every 7 days (after you've added the testing/security repositories). You could have a new Debian every week if you wanted to. :)

    --
    Because teenage pranks are fun when you're about to die!
  6. Re:This is a bad idea by Phleg · · Score: 3, Informative

    Assuming a standard 18-month release cycle, they would support a distribution for exactly the three years offered by RedHat. Each previous version of "stable" is supported for eighteen months, so support for Woody should be phased out as soon as Etch is released. If they keep with the standard release cycle, eighteen months after that when Etch+1 is released, Sarge support will be phased out.

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    No comment.
  7. Re:Run for cover! by Alioth · · Score: 4, Insightful

    To put it in perspective, Debian got Woody and Sarge out in the time that Microsoft has taken to go from XP to Vista. They might even get Etch out before MS gets Vista out. So relatively speaking it's not that bad (especially considering how many packages Debian supports).

    --
    Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
  8. Re:Let me be the first to say... by e5z8652 · · Score: 3, Funny

    Hmm. Instead of rethinking policy for the whole Debian project, since as you point out they do have a large number of perople who actually like a slower release cycle, Debian could come up with a sub-distribution.

    This sub-distribution could be essentially Debian but with an emphasis on the latest and greatest desktop environment, newest kernel, etc. But all of the tools would remain the same (apt-get, etc.) and packages should be interchangeable. (Barring kernel or library dependencies of course - attempting to install the latest udev package on a 2.6.8 Sarge box might have understandable problems.)

    You could call this sub-distribution something friendly and warm, like a word that means something like "humanity to others" in a non-English language, which will appeal to a large number of English speakers as having a name that is easily remembered and catchy but won't be confused with your girlfriend or headgear.

    Then, to avoid the overhead of trying to run a whole other sub-distribution in addition to oldstable, stable, testing, unstable and experimental - you could spin off the sub-distribution and give it a life of it's own, where it can draw on the huge Debian base, but have the independence it needs to track the latest and greatest.

    Excellent!

    --

    null sig

  9. Etch? Where have I been? by LightningTH · · Score: 3, Interesting

    /# cat /etc/debian_version
    2.2 /# cat /proc/version
    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