Debian 6.0 "Squeeze" Frozen

edesio writes with a snippet from debian-news.net, trumpeting an announcement from the ongoing DebConf10 in NYC: "Debian's release managers have announced a major step in the development cycle of the upcoming stable release Debian 6.0 'Squeeze': Debian 'Squeeze' has now been frozen. In consequence this means that no more new features will be added and all work will now be concentrated on polishing Debian 'Squeeze' to achieve the quality Debian stable releases are known for. The upcoming release will use Linux 2.6.32 as its default kernel in the installer and on all Linux architectures.""

Comments

sweet!

[Anonymous Coward]

its just sad Ubuntu gets all the publicity when they just reap the benefits of Debian's hard work.
Debian all the way!

Re:sweet!

[keatonguy]

What a terrible attitude to have. The Open Source community is about shared effort for shared gain, not personal recognition. No matter the distribution that gets all the 'spotlight', it's Linux that reaps the reward, and the more ground Linux gains the better off everyone with a PC is.

Re:sweet!

[tpwch]

Thats not exactly true. A lot of stuff Ubuntu does/fixes gets sent back to Debian. Its a mutual relationship that they both benefit from. The same is true for many other debian-based distributions. And hey, its open source, the people who makes Debian want others to reap their benefits.

Re:sweet!

[blair1q]

I don't get why anyone is surprised that doing things with people turns political.

Re:sweet!

[blair1q]

Pretty much this. And just because everything is somewhat political, it doesn't mean every venture is as bad as every other

True that. I'm pretty sure Thomas Jefferson knew what politics was when he made it the basis of our political system...on purpose...as though it was going to solve problems we used to and no longer have.

Like women and unlike wine, all man's endeavours grow more wrought with bitterness over time.

Depends on your time scale and your skill in choosing either one.

Re:sweet!

[Nimey]

Having a friendly attitude != sucking up, necessarily.

I had to learn this the hard way, back when, so pay heed: politeness is a social lubricant. It gets in the areas where different peoples' rough edges would otherwise rub and create friction, and it costs nothing to be polite.

For example, a few months ago I opened a bug report with $LIBRE_PROJECT asking for help making a Windows build, or whether they'd be kind enough to start releasing Windows builds of the stable tree, rather than an occasional build from an unstable branch. After a bit of back and forth - the guys who weren't involved in making the Windows build were a bit rude - they eventually pointed me to the non-obvious way of compiling their code, and eventually their Windows guy started releasing regular semi-stable builds (the Win build isn't quite there yet).

A little politeness as social lubricant, and I might have helped some other poor schmuck who wanted a free Windows program that does what $PROJECT does.

Re:sweet!

[DarkIye]

You're right. That's always come quite naturally to me, so I've got a history of being surprised at how nice people are in spheres where I've been told by others the only way to get ahead is to 'suck up' or be someone's bitch in an unspecified but theoretically humiliating way.

Re:sweet!

[micheas]

I guess because it doesn't attract the glamour-seekers, nor does it consider itself elite.

I think that Debian suffers from a different form of elitism; the elitism that says "if we release something thats broken to stable we won't fix it because its *STABLE*"

The problem, as I've seen it over the last 10 years as a Debian sysadmin, is that Debian is not run as a business; it doesn't have customers, it has users.

If you want to use Debian in enterprise you NEED a really good engineering team; its really risky to use Debian in the small/medium business eg with sole-sysadmin because when Debian release something thats broken it STAYS broken and you need an internal engineering team to fix, patch and maintain the fixes.

This is why I am encouraging my employer to go with Redhat instead; because Redhat is run as a BUSINESS, they understand the needs of business. For Redhat you are not just a user, you are a CUSTOMER and that actually counts for something.

You might look at the php disaster in RHEL 5.x

Basically, Rackspace is pleading with Redhat to compile pcre with unicode support, and Redhat seems to be saying wait until RHEL 6

php in RHEL is so far behind that many open source and closed source php applications do not support the ancient version of php in RHEL because of the known security issues. (yes Redhat claims to have backported security fixes, but that does not mean that the latest versions of your software support the version of php in RHEL that php does not support.

Of course some of this is the fault of the php project, but still, I think you are suffering from a grass is greener on the other side of the fence syndrome.

Personally, I am leaning to Debian SID and Fedora as my preferred distributions for running web apps. FreeBSD upgrades without console access are not well supported so I am not a big fan of using it on leased servers, but otherwise it is easy to keep the application stack up to date. I don't dislike gentoo, but it has never "felt right" which I guess is just personal work habits or which OS you learned on or some other non-objective thing.

Re:sweet!

[jonadab]

> its just sad Ubuntu gets all the publicity when
> they just reap the benefits of Debian's hard work.

Whose fault is that?

Ubuntu arguably exists, or certainly became as popular as it is, because the Debian people went into some kind of coma or something and completely stopped producing stable releases for several years.

At a time when cutting-edge distros were all moving to Linux 2.6 and conservative distributions and ones that hadn't been updated lately were still using 2.4.x, the Debian installer was asking users if they wanted to try the "new" 2.2 kernel, which might not be totally ready for prime time yet, or stick with the tried and true 2.0 kernel.

Other packages were similarly ancient. If you wanted to install an application that wasn't included in the distribution, or a newer version of some key application, well that was just too bad, because there was no way anything would compile against libraries that old. Reasonable people had pretty much given up on Debian. The word "stable" became a joke. Debian wasn't just stable -- it was of purely historical interest.

Ubuntu came out with an actual release, and people flocked to it, for obvious reasons. Then *another* Ubuntu release came out, and *more* people moved to it. The rest, as they say, is history.

Some of us moved back to Debian when sarge finally came out, but we half expected to end up moving back to Ubuntu, because we didn't really expect the next release to come out in a reasonable timeframe. After the experience we'd just had, we were pretty jaded. The next release (etch) was a little slow in coming too, so some of us were pretty nervous for a while about whether we'd be able to stay with Debian. It wasn't until Lenny came out that I was able to really settle down as a Debian user.

So you might say this news that Squeeze has frozen is "welcome news".

Re:Took long enough _

[al3k]

Debian operates under the "It's done when it's done" philosphy. I usually just disregard deadlines when they mention them

Re:Debian?

[John Hasler]

> Is debian any more up-to-date these days?

Since Ubuntu is derived from Debian, Debian necessarily has always been more "up-to-date" than Ubuntu.

Re:Took long enough _

[Anonymous Coward]

With the "it's done when it's done" philosophy I don't even know why they bother with a release schedule. They'll never hit it. Though I guess you need to set some sort of goal, even if you know you're going to miss it just so you have something to aim for otherwise a release may never happen and you'd end up with something akin to Duke Nukem Forever.

To the "unstable" user (badumtish), the freeze

[GeekDork]

means 6 months of retro computing.

I wish they'd just cut the bull and focus on unstable and testing.

Re:To the "unstable" user (badumtish), the freeze

[at_slashdot]

Why don't you use Ubuntu, that's what they focus on. Some people who like Debian bitch about Ubuntu that is this or that, but they should realize that Ubuntu is protecting Debian from people like you who want to make it less stable and more experimental.

Re:To the "unstable" user (badumtish), the freeze

[couchslug]

"I wish they'd just cut the bull and focus on unstable and testing."

Why should they sacrifice QUALITY in order to do that, when you can just run Unstable, Testing, or another distro?

Re:Debian?

[Anonymous Coward]

Over the years running Debian testing, I've had X break, I've had email break, I've had DNS taking 5 seconds on every call, and I've had Java networking break. I've never had this kind of experience running Windows XP over the same period of time.

Over the years running Windows, I've had virii, I've had malware, I've had BSODs, I've had DRM issues, and I've had thousand more problems I won't enumerate here. I've never had this kind of experience running Linux over the same period of time.

Re:Not just Linux...

[afabbro]

My big problem with this is that FreeBSD is an operating system, kernel + userland. If you are just using the Kernel and not the userland, don't call it FreeBSD.

No, we should call it GNU/FreeBSD.

(ducks)

Re:Not just Linux...

[Anonymous Coward]

GnuBSD obviously...