Re: What's wrong with debian?
On Mon, 28 Feb 2005 17:24:18 -0500 (EST), Robert Brockway
<rbrockway@opentrend.net> wrote:
> On Mon, 28 Feb 2005, Michael Marsh wrote:
> > Sometimes things take longer than you think they're going to,
> > especially if you want to do them correctly.
> Hi Michael. What sort of things do you mean?
Things in general. I'm not a Debian developer, so I can't comment on
any outstanding issues in the release process. I've worked on enough
relatively small projects, however, to know that schedule slippage
happens, unexpected problems crop up, and some problems turn out to be
more difficult in practice than they appeared in theory. The bigger
the project, the more susceptible it is to these various delays.
> I think the release cycle should be no more than 2 years, including code
> freeze. So the code should freeze after 18 months at most allowing plenty
> of time for stabilisation.
Except that Debian doesn't control all of the software. Most of it
comes from external sources, and sometimes those projects make major
upgrades at times that are not convenient for a release crew. Many of
those have to be written off, but some are important enough that they
have to be at least discussed if not included.
> I don't want to put down all the good work done by the Debian developers
> but as far as I'm concerned the release cycle is so slow it is just
> getting silly.
This is, of course, the reason for some of the derivative
distributions, such as Ubuntu. Debian could, in principle, create
another release alias "desktop" that points to testing, and it would
probably suit most desktop users.
> IMHO the best way to approach the release cycle is to aim to make it
> fairly regular (12-18 months would be ideal) with modest aims. The _only_
> significant criticism I hear about Debian is the age of the stable
> version. If it was not for this I believe it would have a far large share
> of Linux installations to its name. It's got the stability and the
> integration people want. I think it is possible to make a distro this
> good with a more regular release cycle as long as the targets for each new
> major release are modest.
A goal of regular releases is fine, but slippage is going to occur and
should be tolerated. Sarge isn't the typical release, though, and it
might be best to wait for its release and judge by the time it takes
for Etch to stabilize.
--
Michael A. Marsh
http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~mmarsh
http://mamarsh.blogspot.com
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