Woody and start anew, XF4.2 and Mozilla too.
At 04:17 PM 6/10/2002 -0500, Paul Baker wrote:
On Sunday, June 9, 2002, at 03:24 AM, Anthony DeRobertis wrote:
Potato was released August 15, 2000. That means Woody is approaching two
years. (http://www.debian.org/News/2000/20000815)
Slink was released March 9, 1999. That means potato took 18 months.
(http://www.debian.org/News/1999/19990309)
Hamm was released July 24, 1998. That means slink took a little over 7
months. (http://www.debian.org/News/1998/19980724)
Debian 1.3 was released June 2, 1997. That means Hamm took almost 14
months. (http://www.debian.org/News/1997/19970602)
Before this, the News section does not tell.
Woody will be the longest Debian release cycle to date. Hopefully for
ever.
If you ask me, that is a testament to just how good of a release Potato
was that we were able to wait almost 2 years before releasing a major
revision.
This is not directly sent to Paul, it looks like you are not the only
person that is happy about the 2 year upgrade cycle.
It appears that many of you were able to wait 2 years without any sort of
upgrades... I must finally put in my $0.02 now that I have spent so much
time reading all of these treads about the release cycle and the
availability of the bleeding edge software. Is X4.2 or Mozilla 1.0 in
Woody or not... bla bla bla.
Makes me proud to be a Debian user, and relieves me as a System
Administrator that I don't have to go through major software upgrade pains
every 6 months in order to make sure my system is up-to-date with security
fixes. A new release every 2 years is plenty quick if you ask me.
In the world of Microsoft, most all of the upgrades are "Feature
Enhancements" and not really true bug fixes... This world has taught most
all [L]users that software must be upgraded very often. We admins don't
really like this idea however we support the users. This mostly comes at
the cost of much wasted time spent by the Sysadmins that have to figure out
how to do something when there isn't any slick neato wiz bang "Wise
Instillation/Conversion Wizard"
This is not always the case with [LU]nix as we don't need Wizards or
point-and-click to get things done smoothly.
When you are maintaining a cluster of systems, OS upgrades are the things
you most dread because there is a lot, I repeat A LOT of testing that must
be done before rolling things out.
You test on a non-production machine if/when you have one... I know that
you already know this however some of us don't have "test boxes" and must
be very careful when upgrading, this is where I only want security
fixes... I have a copy of vmware, this is my test box!
One of the reasons I use Debian is that I don't have to expose the
stability of my systems to Microsoft like release cycles that most of the
other Linux distributions put their users through.
There is a reason for this fast pace release cycle that other Linux
distributions like to use, it's following the same ideals that Microsoft
releases so often. We as systems admins are forced to support the users
that rely on our systems. The users require that we have available to them
all the latest and greatest versions of stuff.
I ran 2 systems for a company and those machines were potato boxes. One of
the developers required php 4.1.something. This is NOT available in
potato. This was also before I really knew how to manage the selection of
packages from newer version of Debian (get it from woody/sid while running
a potato box)
I had to build apache/mod_perl/php from source and install them. This was
fine except shortly after that, the machine was rooted. The only software
on these systems that wasn't Debian was the above mentioned pieces and
qmail/vpopmail. I wasn't subscribed to this list as well as others and all
I did was use dselect to update these systems every so often and did see
security updates come in occasionally... The bad guys actually deleted all
the web site's content dirs, the vpopmail dir (all email on the box!) and
even the MySql table files and last but not least, they nuked
"/bin". These machines live in San Diego, I live in West Virginia... I
had to have the disks fedex'ed to me so I could recover as much as
possible. New disks were installed and those machines have been running
woody since. The moral of the story, a developer required software not
available in the Debian system (as far as I was able to determine at the
time) and it got my systems hacked. I want to be able to support the users
with the required software with the latest features and have the help of
the Debian Security team keeping things up to date. Saying no to newer
versions of stuff in "stable" is asking for trouble like I had. I don't
have any real suggestion on how to keep these upgrades from happening
automatically so don't ask me how this should be done without actually
holding all the packages you don't want to upgrade.
If the newest version of a software package is made into a .deb package,
you don't need to install it but when one of your [L]users/developers
demand that you to use it, you can have the support of the Debian security
team when you do install it. XF4.2 when ready and Mozilla 1.0 should be
available even if not the "default" install version of these packages.
I am not a Debian Developer yet but will be working on becoming one when I
decide I have the time to commit to the project. I have however been
following this list for about 6 months now and been a Debian
user/admnistrator since slink was released.
This is my opinion and you may or may not agree with me, that is ok or too
bad, your choice.
Loren
--
Paul Baker
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin, 1759
GPG Key: http://homepage.mac.com/pauljbaker/public.asc
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