Re: Danger Will Robinson! Danger!
our biggest handicap is that we're always a year behind everyone else. being
a year behind is suicide in any industry. being a year behind in an industry
that moves as fast as open source software, is idiocy. our stable release is
using 2.0.36. most people are afraid of our 'unstable' tree. you've seen all
the threads about people trying to upgrade from slink to potato and having
all sorts of problems. why do they do it? because slink is so far behind
that it isn't usefull anymore.
IMHO, leaving out 2.4 is a bad idea. there were problems with 2.0 -> 2.2.
there was an incompatible build of lsof, as well as some networking
problems. i feel the same way about xf86 4.0 and apache 2.0. all of these
releases are going to generate a lot of press, not to mention the fact that
these are very usefull products. yeah, it will be a lot of work. building a
good distribution *is* a lot of work.
this thread brings up an interesting topic: how can we keep up?
the debian project is huge. no one is going to contest that it could be
difficult to pump out a stable release of this size every 3 months. or any
interval for that matter. but something really does have to be done, or
debian will fall into laughability. i think i have the beginning of a good
idea. please flame/comment as you see fit.
make a release every 3 months with an official cd image, fanfair on the
website, the whole shebang. only include enough on the cd to do a basic
install. only consider 'release critical' bugs release critical if they're
against required base pacakges. the rest of the distribution would remain on
the archive sites.
with this pattern, we produce four releases per year. three interim releases
(2.3, 2.4, 2.5) and one major release (3.0). in order to figure out what
packages to include on the interim release, we probably should get
statistics on what most people use. perhaps analize logs from the archive
sites, and encourage more people to use popularity-contest.deb.
what do you folks think?
Ben Collins (bcollins@debian.org) wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 11, 2000 at 01:57:49PM -0500, SCOTT FENTON wrote:
> > OK, Linus has just put out 2.3.51, the next patch will be a pre-2.4 one.
> > To avoid the problems we've had with slink not being 2.2, I reccomend
> > that, even if it's not the default, we include a 2.4 /binary/ in potato.
> > You could even put a note in the potato release notes saying you don't
> > reccomend putting it on, but please /please/ PLEASE put potato out with
> > a 2.4, or even pre-2.4 binary.
>
> What problems have we have with slink not being 2.2? I don't see any. In
> fact, I protest profusely, since 2.4 will require a great deal of work to
> work out the pcmcia kinks. There is nothing wrong with 2.2. What I want is
> 2.2.15 in potato, nothing more.
>
> --
> -----------=======-=-======-=========-----------=====------------=-=------
> / Ben Collins -- ...on that fantastic voyage... -- Debian GNU/Linux \
> ` bcollins@debian.org -- bcollins@openldap.org -- bmc@visi.net '
> `---=========------=======-------------=-=-----=-===-======-------=--=---'
>
>
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--
(jacob kuntz) jake@{megabite,underworld}.net jpk@cape.com
(megabite systems) "think free speech, not free beer." (gnu foundataion)
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