Re: potato late, goals for woody (IMHO)
>
> At the same time, I have to cope with people whose main technical
> education is reading magazines. When no one had heard of Linux, we had to
> explain why were not using Windows NT or Solaris or whatever. Now we have
> to explain merely why we are not using Red Hat. I suppose this is an
> improvement, and probably even Bob Young would find that funny.
>
> We would never use potato if I did not personally believe that it was
> adequately stable. Nevertheless, Debian's release policy pulls the rug
> out from under me. I do not enjoy discussions that go generally like
> this: "So, I understand you're running our enterprise database system on
> an 'unstable' version of Linux?" "Uh, yeah, but we think it works OK."
> "If it works OK, why do they call it 'unstable?'"
I have found personally that debian Patoto being branded a unstable version is
a politcal problem and i agree entirely with Mike.
My company sets up a lot of servers, which are increasily being installed
with patoto on them because of the features over the stable version.
Mangers, ceo's, and inhouse technical people all seem to groan and stare
shocked when they find out that you are are replacing what they perceive is
their
perfectly working windows NT/windows 2000 servers with an unstable operating
system. But anyone who has used both debian and windows NT knows full well
there a whole lot less bugs in patoto than there is in NT
People will feel intially unease when they know there mission critical systems
are running
on an unstable OS. And shortening the realease cycles will improve this
situation, features
that make debian competitive can be aviable in suitably named realeases.
Addressing the labeling
of realeases could also overcome this problem. if you used another word instead
of unstable...
or changed the branding of stable to super stable.
Ideally i would like to see a new stable version of debian realeased every 8-12
months.
Linux as a community has a reputation of slow but steady broad progress. I'd
like to see faster
growth with linux, an OS a lot more advanced, easier to use and more powerful
than the other major
player.
Andrew Hill
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