Re: Future releases of Debian
I'm sorry I can't easily reply directly to your messages on debian-devel
as I'm not subscribed. You may be interested in my freeze date and release
date estimate [1]. You may also find it interesting that Testing can get
security updates [2]. The problem with security updates though is not
enough man power (talk to idividual affected maintainers about this).
To summarize: Sarge is likely waiting for kde and gnome to make their way
into testing. Currently they wait for openldap2, some 68k building issues
[3] and a few other things [4]. I believe Sarge will likely "freeze" by
the end of this year (It almost is thought of as frozen.). Sarge will
likely be released 6 months after freeze which puts it ready for release
in summer 2004. My predictions are based on information (goals,
precedents, historical statistics...) I've collected from the archives. I
agree that a freeze prediction, however inaccurate (but within a year) is
useful to developers, and that a release prediction is equally valuable to
users. I'm also quite happy with debian-installer, it works most of the
time for me with the occational serious bugs that get fixed fairly quickly
and would not likely crop up after a freeze. If you want to know that's
left for the debian-installer, see the todo list in the cvs and ask in
debian-boot. I don't know whether a graphical debian-installer is a high
priority, if so then more help should go to the debian-boot people.
Some things like the gcc 3.3 transition, xfree86 4.3... are not needed to
start a freeze cycle. gcc 3.3 transition bugs can be considered RC bugs
that need to be fixed before release or else the packages get removed.
xfree86 4.2.x is already in testing and so 4.3.x could be accepted furring
the early part of a freeze (providing it's not radically different, which I
don't believe it is).
If you want to help with the co-ordination of releases and revisions you
should subscribe to debian-release and offer your services in places that
seem appropriate and useful.
You may also be interested in my unofficial Sarge Release issue status
reports that I've been posting monthly to debian-devel. I'm working on a
wiki entry for it, but I'm having some trouble with getting the wiki.d.o
admin(s) to apply a patch to add a feature that I need.
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2003/debian-release-200306/msg00004.html
[2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2003/debian-release-200307/msg00009.html
[3] http://lists.debian.org/debian-68k/2003/debian-68k-200307/msg00033.html
[4] http://lists.debian.org/debian-kde/2003/debian-kde-200306/msg00278.html
and http://lists.debian.org/debian-gtk-gnome/2003/debian-gtk-gnome-200307/msg00006.html
Drew Daniels
Reply to: