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?"

[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: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.