release cycle flame war
Once again I am reading about the infamous debian
release cycle. I agree that having a stable distro is
important, but so is having up to date support for
critical items. For most of the packages in Debian,
not having the latest version is not a big deal as
these packages are so mature that grabing the source
for the next version and installing it yourself won't
break anything else. HOWEVER a fair number of
packages MUST be CAREFULLY intergrated into the
distribution or they WILL be broken, or break
something else. Going between MAJOR kernel versions
(2.2.x > 2.3/4.x), XFree86_3.3 -> XFree86_4.0, etc
WILL break many things and is something the casual
linux user will NOT want to try to do him/her self.
When major libs change (glibc2.0 -> 2.1) almost
EVERYTHING COULD break. Changes of this order very
well might require a complete distro upgrade, better
to do such lib changes at release time, even if debian
lags behind the power curve as a result.
Can debian do better? Maybe.
Could it be possible to create an upgrade task package
that would upgrade ALL the necessary packages,
scripts, etc needed to go from one kernel major
version to the next WITHOUT a complete distro release?
How about the same for Xfree86?. If these major
components can change without breaking too many
packages (requiring upgrades of the broken packages,
probably mostly those in admin) then maybe these
system upgrade tasks would allow Debian users to keep
current without waiting for the next distro release.
PS. I am currently running Potato on one computer and
have had only very minor problems (mostly with package
depandancies being broken briefly while new verisons
were being uploaded. The developers have quickly
fixed these problems on the download site.) You are
progressing nicely though the freeze I think.
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