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Bugs Delay Release of Debian Lenny

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the better-late-than-buggy dept.

A. B. VerHausen writes to tell us that over 200 release-critical bugs continue to push back Debian Lenny's release date. Originally slated for a September release, there is still a long road to be traveled before Lenny sees the light of day. Project leader Steve McIntyre says they may consider dropping some packages for the release if they continue to cause problems, and while an end of October release is the goal, only time will tell.

7 of 227 comments (clear)

  1. What else is new? by martinw89 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Shocking!!!

    Seriously, this doesn't seem unusual. I'm happy that the team is waiting until all the bugs are squashed.

  2. Good! by bjourne · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is good news. There are many distributions that just take the latest and greatest of every package without doing proper quality control (Ubuntu, Gentoo, Fedora, etc). The price they pay is regressions and stuff that doesn't work. There needs to be distros like Debian which, while always delayed, has all the important bugs ironed out.

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    1. Re:Good! by Meshach · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Obviously you have never worked in software QA. There are always bugs that make it into released project. The art of good project management is deciding which bugs can be allowed into the final project (ie which will actually impact users).

      Also I am pretty sure that Ubuntu is based on Debian.

      --
      "Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
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    2. Re:Good! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Obviously you suck at reading comprehension.

      There needs to be distros like Debian which, while always delayed, has all the important bugs ironed out.

    3. Re:Good! by Hatta · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Exactly. And if you're too impatient to wait for them to get all the bugs out, that's what Sid is for. I've been using debian unstable since it was lenny, and it's always been very good. It's very rare that there's actually a bug in a package I use, so it's plenty stable for my purposes.

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    4. Re:Good! by hakr89 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      There needs to be distros like Debian which, while always delayed, has all the important bugs ironed out.

      ..cough..OpenSSL vulnerability..cough

  3. Re:Debian has no release date!!! by RAMMS+EIN · · Score: 5, Insightful

    While I don't dispute the claims you make, I would like to point out that

    1. Debian does make announcements about prospective release dates. These aren't firm promises and shouldn't be interpreted as such, but it is disappointing when they miss those dates by months.

    2. Releases aren't only made when the bug count drops to zero. First of all, there are bugs that aren't considered "release-critical". Secondly, sometimes (I think this happened with etch) releases are made with known issues and a promise to fix those issues Real Soon Now. Thirdly, the way the bug count is brought to zero usually includes simply throwing out packages that have known bugs. If many people want such a package, that isn't very helpful.

    3. Bugs that would have been "release-critical" are often discovered after a release is made. The current stable release, etch, had more release-critical bugs pending against it than lenny (the upcoming stable release), last time I checked.

    What all this means is that Debian will _not_ generalyl be released at any date that has been mentioned, and will _not_ generally be bug-free when released.

    Having said all that, it's still my favorite operating system, as it takes less of my time to use and maintain than anything else I have tried (and that is quite a lot).

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