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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."
And refering to Spring/Winter is too imprecise. It's currently (July) Winter in the Southern Hemisphere.
Try refering to Quarter 1, Quatert 4, etc for times of the year.
However nit picking aside, at least we shall now get some certainty in the releases of (probably) the worlds best distro.
8-)
Q:I was listening to a CD in Grip and it sounded horrible! What's up? A:Perhaps you are listening to country music
a.) It says December, I'm pretty sure December is always in December no matter what hemisphere you're in, which makes it pretty obvious what they mean by Spring.
b.) No one cares about the Southern Hemisphere.
Er, ish.
Debian Stable is the closest Debian has to an equivalent of Ubuntu's LTS release. Debian Testing's about a Ubuntu 'normal'.
But the two distros work in different ways, the comparison's not that cut-and-dried, since LTS releases are just normal releases with long support times.
Debian Stable is unchanging in featureset for its lifetime, Debian Testing is the testing for the next Stable, and Debian Unstable is where the changes to be tested are made.
As I understand it, Ubuntu 'freezes' a mirror of Debian testing, prettifies it, and releases it as Ubuntu. This is grossly under-representing Ubuntu's contribution, but is sort-of accurate in principle
No schedule, feature based or time based, will have all upstream developers in sync. Someone will always be developing new stuff and want to squeeze it in.
At least this way, there's a known target that developers can be (made) aware of.
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.
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