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Debian Decides To Adopt Time-Based Release Freezes
frenchbedroom writes "The ongoing Debconf 9 meeting in Cáceres, Spain has brought a significant change to Debian's project management. The Debian project will now freeze development in December of every odd year, which means we can expect a new Debian release in the spring of every even year, starting with 'Squeeze' in 2010. Until now, development freezing was decided by the Debian release team. From the announcement: 'The project chose December as a suitable freeze date since spring releases proved successful for the releases of Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (codenamed "Etch") and Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 ("Lenny"). Time-based freezes will allow the Debian Project to blend the predictability of time based releases with its well established policy of feature based releases. The new freeze policy will provide better predictability of releases for users of the Debian distribution, and also allow Debian developers to do better long-term planning. A two-year release cycle will give more time for disruptive changes, reducing inconveniences caused for users. Having predictable freezes should also reduce overall freeze time.' We previously discussed talks between Canonical and the Debian release team about fixed freeze dates."
Two things to note.
First, the small font used for the non-mainpage stories makes me read the story title as "Lesbian decides to adopt time-based release freezes".
Second, limiting an OSS project to a time-based release cycle puts an artificial constraint on the development process. While it might be useful to encourage faster development in some cases, it is just as likely to force a new feature to be dropped at the last minute if it can't make it through the door in time.
I'd rather they stick with feature-based releases which focus on the quality of features rather than trying to force feature development into a specific duration.
I've always liked Debian's way of doing their releases, it was unique and worked really well for them for awhile; I hope this new way works out for the best and mutually benefits both Debian and Ubuntu.
Still thank you to the debian team for we depend on their hard work.
cat /etc/issue /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/lsb_release
cat
cat
Often works. It's by no means ubiquitous, I'm well aware, but it's rarely *that* difficult.
Ubuntu does reasonably well with this. They get the catchy name *and* obvious order by coming up with names associated with a letter, in alphabetical order. Jaunty is more recent then Feisty because "J" comes after "F".
And then they also stick the month and year on as the version number, which I thought was a good idea. 9.04 Jaunty is more recent then 7.04 Feisty because "J" comes after "F" and "April 2009" comes after "April 2007".
And finally you get an "about" page that lists both the name and the number.
Does a line appended to your comment give your post meaning in and of itself, or only in relation to those without?
Seeing as how debian only releases every century or so, that's not really a problem. The current release is the one you hear about. If it's not that it's the one you vaguely remember. The one before your kids were born, you were in high school, or possibly back when MTV played music videos (or insert some other thing waay back). If it's a version you haven't heard of it's so outdated that only the old long bearded unix sages locked up in corporate server farms programing cobol/fortran remember much about.
I run Debian stable on my laptop, and I don't see why I would run Ubuntu instead of Debian. Debian has a larger range of packages and is much more flexible and forgiving if you don't want to run one of the preconfigured subdistros (i.e. Ubuntu/Gnome, Kubuntu, Xubuntu etc.). Plus, having run distributions like Debian/sid or Gentoo, which have continuous updates, I find the reliability you get from a computer which never randomly changes packages is a plus. The six-monthly timetable of Ubuntu is much too short for that; I would've got the bugs ironed out just in time for a new release. There is, as you indicate, the LTS releases: but they're just one of the regular releases and this means you get people pulling in opposite directions (latest and greatest vs good for the whole three/five years). Also, is there some guarantee that you can always upgrade from one LTS release to the next LTS release?
In short, with Debian stable, I know what I'm getting. With Ubuntu, in my mind there's too much uncertainty that I'll have a reliable computer for its lifespan. Even if there isn't any uncertainty, there's no reason to convert. No matter how good Ubuntu is, I can't imagine it being better enough than Debian (on my desktop for my purposes) to warrant converting.
(That said, I would like answers to my questions. Googling "Ubuntu LTS" gives you almost nothing about LTS in general. The one page that's not information about a specific release has almost no content: a paragraph about Ubuntu's normal release schedule, a paragraph about the LTS release schedule, and a paragraph taking you to a list of pages about the beta releases (!) of distributions released a year (!!) or three (!!!) ago. This absence of information, and absence of relevant information, fills me with an absence of confidence, and it's one reason I'm not going to switch my laptop from Debian stable.)
Look out!
For Debian based systems:
/etc/debian_version
cat
You should probably get your centuries looked at, if you're only getting around two years out of them. Mine last a hundred years or so; I gather that's about average.
Look out!
lsb_release -a
The debian page itself lists releases by number and code name. So does Mac OS X, of course they are all referred to by code name too, leopard, tiger, etc. The Windows world has it easy, Windows 7 comes after windows 95, as per standard numbering schemes. Don't forget that in number based versioning schemes 2.1 is different than 2.10, and that 2.1 is before 2.9, which in turn is before 2.10. In debian of course you could just replace codenames with stable, testing and unstable and be done with it.
To live till you die is to live long enough. -Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching