Re: Release Date of Woody?
I don't know why, but heres some free advice for life in general: The
answer you seek depends upon the meaning of your question.
Heres my advice on "release dates":
If you need a schedule to decide when / how to upgrade your machines,
forget dates. Dates don't matter. If you need stability for a production
environment, choose "stable". If you need the latest greatest and
buggiest, choose "unstable". If you need something in between, choose
"testing". There is not "the one true, unchanging Debian version X.Y
forever", and that is good. The concept of "apt-get upgrade" runs so deep
in the project I would say it's one of the core values. The concept of
"apt-get" opposes the concept of "releases", I get a "release" every night
I go home and "apt-get upgrade". If you need features but want to run
mostly stable, like I do at work, just "apt-get install" your way to what
you need, and nothing more, but remember that with new features come new
bugs. It's your choice.
If you are writing a comparative review or article, I would say that the
debugging of most commercial distributions fit somewhere between Debian
"unstable" and "testing", probably closer to "unstable" because of
marketing pressure, so install "testing", "stable", and "unstable" and
compare all of them to Redhat, Suse, because they are all different. And
please downplay the "installation procedure" in your review. Most Debian
users use their OS, not install it over and over. Making it easy to
install only appeals to the script kiddies who have inflated ideas of how
cool they are because they "installed Linux". "Hey man, I'm an elite
hacker because I installed Mandrake last night, bow to my technical
greatness, Oh and my (hard drive) is bigger that yours also" It doesn't
matter if its hard to install, because you'll only do it once with Debian.
Unlike most O.S.es, free or pay, you don't need to reinstall to upgrade,
that's another core Debian belief. Again, this relates to apt-get again,
the only reason to reinstall Debian is because the hard drive crashed.
Finally, my last gripe is that comparing something that was debugged for
one day like a commercial distribution vs something that has been debugged
for months and months like "stable" is not fair because they are in totally
different product classes.
If you are a CD vendor, wanting to press a CD of whatever is available on a
specific day and call it the official release, because that day was (once)
declared to be "The Release Date", then please go away. Most people will
not benefit from a CD with last months bugs and without this months
features, so don't bother burning unstable CDroms unless you plan to throw
them out in a month. Really, the way most people have at least dial-up
access, I can't see much of a market for CDRoms anyway. I do own a set of
"stable potato" CDRoms for a stand alone cluster that has no internet
access, but I'm sure I'm in the minority. People say you can't beat the
bandwidth of a 747 full of CDRoms, but the latency is just too long, and
most people only buy one or two CDRoms, not a 747 full of them. Carrying
the analogy too far, the bandwidth of a stationary warehouse full of year
old Debian CDRoms is zero...
Maybe you want to do P.R.? Contact the PR group.
Maybe you are just curious? So am I. I'd like to know exactly what date
I'll die, so I can be extra paranoid that day. Wanting to know something
that is unknowable is not productive, however interesting it might be.
Besides, how can you "release" something that is already "free"? I guess
the answer to when woody will be released, is that woody was released the
day that unstable changed from potato to woody. "Released" from GPLed
freedom to what? Certainly non-free packages will still be non-free even
after they are "released". The same DFSG apply before and after the
"release" date, so what is really being "released" other than a P.R. blitz?
To make a computing analogy, releases are important to "for profit"
companies because they do business in a "batch" style. Free organizations
like Debian use a more evolved "interactive" style of business. Trying to
shove batch processes and batch ideas thru an interactive system is...
weird. There's a generation gap in concepts and procedures between
old-style commercial software (including some Linux distributions) and
Debian. Never trust any software over 30 (dollars), that's what I say.
In summary, your question is wrong.
----- Forwarded by Vince Mulhollon/Norlight on 12/18/2000 12:10 PM -----
Harald Dunkel
<harri@synops To: debian-devel@lists.debian.org
ys.COM> cc: (bcc: Vince Mulhollon/Norlight)
Sent by: Fax to:
harri@synopsy Subject: Re: Release Date of Woody?
s.COM
12/18/2000
12:07 PM
Jan Martin Mathiassen wrote:
>
> now, tell me, why are you so hell-bent on getting a firm release date for
> woody?
>
I asked whether a release schedule exists. It was not my intention
to influence a possible release schedule in any way or to push
anybody to create one.
Regards
Harri
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