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Bugs Delay Release of Debian Lenny
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.
Shocking!!!
Seriously, this doesn't seem unusual. I'm happy that the team is waiting until all the bugs are squashed.
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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For production quality operating systems there is *nothing* better than release when ready. Given the sheer number of packages and diversity of platforms, all the Debian volunteers do a great job.
It remains the corner-case user who needs the latest and greatest release of any given package.
As an fyi, I've been running Lenny for at least 6 months as a clean-install desktop with no issues. Upgrading from stable to Lenny had issues for me. I've got two servers running Lenny without show-stopper bugs right now.
Lenny's got a really nice KDE4 in an unofficial repo at deb http://kde4.debian.net/ . I encourage users to check it out. Don't enter bugs against these packages in Debian though.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Seriously.
If this is happening, first check the changelog for the affected package in /usr/share/doc. If it is out of date or missing, you need to file a severity minor (with the following rationale) against the packages missing the updated changelog. This is not a violation of Debian policy (which would warrant a severity of serious), but it's suggested by policy and trivial to add.
What I would like to have is a 4.1 release
Well, don't project what you want unto the rest of the world.
Debian stable is a server distro. Every time there is an upgrade, a full regression test must be done to the server. This is expensive and time-consuming. The whole idea of Debian stable is that it is stable and doesn't change often. No one running stable wants the latest and greatest. We want stability and security fixes. That's it.
Clearly you already know about the testing and unstable releases, but did you know about backports and volitile? Volitile is great for things like anti-virus and anti-spam software that you really do want and need upgrades. Backports is a little different--it's basically upgrades for popular packages in stable, and you can pick and choose which ones you want.
Stable means stable, and backports and volitile are great tools to help you. If you want the latest and greatest, that's what the testing release is for.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Be careful. I hear Mark Shuttleworth has a patent on that.
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Debian has no release date. It never had, and doesn't seem to have any plans on adopting release dates. Thus, Debian can't be "late", since being late implies on missing a release date, and Debian doesn't have that. Or, maybe I didn't repeat that enough, so let me tell you: Debian never made a compromisse on releasing any version on any exact day.
What Debian does have is a list of bugs. Everytime testing is frozen, it is created a list with the showstopper bugs, and release happens when that list becomes empty. The list can increase if more bugs are found, or decrease if bugs are solved or some functionality removed.
Debian also do have people betting when it'll be out. Those people give specific (or sometimes not very specific) dates, but that isn't a release date for the team, just a guesstimate.
Rethinking email
Possibly, but I truly don't think Microsoft could ever do right around here. Short of releasing the OS under either the BSD license or the GPL, they will forever have a reputation as software bloaters, monopolists, and DRM-supporters. And such a reputation is not undeserved.
The truth is, I'm not sure they could ever make a stable release of Windows. Vista was horribly delayed, horribly buggy on release, and had dropped a fair number of planned features in order to prevent further delays. If they'd planned to quash most of the bugs before release, I wonder how long it would have taken to get it all done?
Debian has the benefit of a good reputation and of having free software. People aren't scared to run pre-release versions of Debian in production, and it's relatively simple to fix many bugs yourself while waiting for something official from Debian. This means that Debian gets more testers doing real work with their release candidates.
Compare this to Microsoft, who also publish beta and release candidates for free (though free-as-in-beer.) How many people ran Vista full-time before it was released? Heck, Microsoft can barely get people to run it full-time now that it's been out for a while!
I still use Debian Sarge on my current server.
Bad idea. Support for Sarge ended in April, so you haven't been getting any security updates since then, and there are some known weaknesses.
You should upgrade to Etch, ASAP.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Red Hat marketing may not acknowledge point releases, but they do indeed exist. And CentOS tracks 'em. That's why I know. (Too cheap for RHEL, too lazy for Fedora. I use Kubuntu for desktops, but the server has always been in the Red Hat lineage.)
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