Debian Maintainer Hints At September Release for Lenny

nerdyH writes "The Debian project's maintainer, Luke Claes, announced in an email Saturday that he will freeze the 'testing' or 'Lenny' tree, in preparation for a new stable release of Debian Linux in ... September! The freeze means that open source software developers have only a couple more days to package any applications that they want to be included in the next release of Debian — and by extension, in the inner sanctum source lists of distributions such as Ubuntu that are based on it. After the freeze starts next week, Debian maintainers will turn their attention to 364 release-critical bugs, and half-a-dozen high-priority goals. Given the work to be done, is September really feasible? Lenny always was a little slow getting back to his right place ..."

Comments

Packaging... meh.

[AllIGotWasThisNick]

only a couple more days to package any applications that they want to be included in the next release of Debian

If you've left packaging until the freeze announcement, you don't deserve to be included.

Obligatory "does it matter?"

[neapolitan]

I run Debian in several capacities -- stable on my work server, and unstable on my personal machine.

A lot of people are going to (quite accurately, I guess) point out that for anybody running unstable/experimental there is not much to this. I mean, release numbers are soooo 1990's, as a simple apt-get update; apt-get upgrade brings you up to the latest packages. Even experimental seems to lag waaaay behind other bleeding edge distros though (gentoo).

Of course, the release is more important for new installs or people running stable. I have been very impressed with Debian stable, the SSH bug nonwithstanding.

As software packages and Linux get more mature, I see the definition of a "release" issue becoming even less important for the non-server / non-corporate user. Continuous upgrades are the way of the future. Even on the M$ side this seems to be true, with their MS office 200x and "automatic upgrades."

Thoughts?

Re:Obligatory "does it matter?"

[wellingj]

Agreed. If you need Unstable you are either a Debian developer, should think about becoming a Debian developer, or better off using Gentoo.

Re:Obligatory "does it matter?"

[LostInTaiwan]

You should give Sid another try. I've been running it on my laptop since Woody release and and I'm no where near the level of a developer. I run stable on all my servers but Sid is the only way to go for laptops. Etch is a lot better than Woody, but for personal machines, Sid is even better.

Re:Obligatory "does it matter?"

[millosh]

I am using testing at my servers and unstable/experimental on my desktops and laptops. Actually, in some cases, like TV servers are, I am using there unstable/experimental, too.

At my old laptop, I installed unstable in late 2004 and ran that until February this year without any significant problem except that for some time I ran Firefox 3beta until it didn't become stable enough to go into Debian unstable (and became Iceweasel) :)

A week or two ago, after one of apt-get update--apt-get upgrade iterations I've got some (I suppose) Synaptic derivate: "live update". And I am now perfectly happy with a little wheel on my task bar which becomes orange when new updates are ready.

Besides that, installation of operating system may be interesting and funny at the beginning. But, after years of professional usage of different kinds of OSs, reinstallations became a very frustrating task for me. When I switched from SuSE to Debian in in the middle of 2004, I felt like I loosed a big rock from my neck: I didn't need to think about new major versions, I had always the latest stable software -- I didn't have to compile new Apache (with PHP and the rest of important modules) whenever some major feature was released...

I think that ordinary users are not *so* happy with reinstallations of the system and big upgrades (like switching from one version of Windows to another is), too. Software should be useful, not a goal per se.

So, yes, I think that in the future, software distributions will be based on upgrades: for free or for fee.

If similar is possible for, let's say, cars -- I am sure that the most of car owners would prefer silent fixes and upgrades than buying new cars and fixing and upgrading it manually.

Of course, there would be always people who prefer to do everything alone. But, I don't think that it is a majority. Or, at least, someone may prefer to play with car hardware, but not with computer (or even car) software or refrigerator.

In other words, if installing software is not your job or your passion, it is much better to spend your time in reading a book, playing WoW, having sex or whatever else, than in trying to do something which other people are doing much better for you, than you are able to do.

Re:Obligatory "does it matter?"

[daemonburrito]

Good advice.

Etch is maintained to 2009-09. dist-upgrading a production server on release day, just for the fun of it, is probably a terrible idea. I'll be sticking with etch well into next year.

Re:Obligatory "does it matter?"

[Eunuchswear]

If you are using "stable" in your sources.list verses the actually release name you'll in all likelihood just upgrade right along to the new release, and probably without much fuss.

Never do this in any kind of production environment! You'd be crazy to do any release->release update without testing your own apps first.

Re:Obligatory "does it matter?"

[MadMidnightBomber]

Debian 'unstable' is still more stable than Windows. Don't mod this funny, I'm entirely serious.

PS. You wimps who don't like living on the edge can always use 'testing'.

Re:Will they keep the bug count artificially low?

[setagllib]

There's a big difference between a release-critical bug (one that would basically ruin a whole release for everyone) and an annoyance (such as spewing diagnostic messages under certain circumstances on certain hardware).

Ubuntu has stuck to its schedules by releasing with plenty of release-critical bugs still in the air, and fixing most of them in post-release updates. That's cool for getting a release out there, but it basically makes every official release feel like an RC1.

Re:Freeze just now?

[jd]

Just looked through the Debian package list. Looks like there's a lot I'd have expected that isn't there (ATLAS seems to be missing, as are the MUMPS and Fortran 95 programming languages - gfortran's f90 support is considered an old dialect, buggy and inadequate by a number of Fortran sites, and I didn't see Erlang on the list either). There are also a lot of ancient versions. For example, HDF5 1.6.6 has not been supported for some time. HDF 1.6.7 is the supported current version in the 1.6.x branch and has been since February, but the website makes it clear that the 1.8.x branch is intended as the official current release.

This is something that isn't Debian't fault -- there are way too many packages with way too many updates and far too few people helping -- and is something that all distributins suffer from. The specialist distros may help, but I don't like the concept. Beter to have a single core distro with extensions for specialist needs, as then you can combine extensions according to problem-space rather than dealing with the version hell that always happens when you mix distros.