On Tue, Nov 05, 2002 at 05:24:31PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote: > On Mon, Nov 04, 2002 at 05:37:14PM -0700, Joel Baker wrote: > > I don't see any *fundamental* reason why we couldn't, either. > > Try installing sarge right now. Try taking quotes completely out of context. "Fundamental reason", as I used it, was meant to indicate something on the order of a law of nature. Decisions to abandon (problematic) old software before the replacement even *exists* in any meaningful fashion do not qualify. Again, I assert: the only thing which truly prevents Debian from having an actual release schedule is the utter lack of interest in changing way in which we decide when to do a release. In other circles, "we have six months until we try to release again" means that if the installer takes 18 months to write, you assume that you do not have it for 3 release cycles. Other things may happen to cause the cycle to slip, often unforseen (and exceeding normally accounted for) last-minute delays, but they don't *assume* that 18 months is a viable release cycle. And it is proven to function, and work. Debian's method is also proven to function, and work... up to a point. I say that empirical evidence indicates that we have reached the point where it is no longer tenable as it is. Prior to Woody, I heard the refrain "testing will fix this, but it hasn't had a chance to sit between major releases to prove it". Okay, valid argument. Now that it's sitting between major releases, it may well be true that we could freeze and release much faster (having not yet tried to do it, I can only say 'it appears likely'). So we... make choices that guarantee another 2-year release cycle. Seriously: can you name at least one other significant (let's say, oh, 1000 users as a reasonable minima; certainly we have far more, as do most things folks would consider major), evolving (as opposed to mature) project which makes feature-upgrade releases once every 2 years, and is considered at all successful? I can name only one off the top of my head - TinyFugue. Which is steadily having people switch away from it to other clients that offer the same basic function, because it hasn't even remotely kept up with features. I wouldn't say it is a success any longer, so much as "the only client of it's capabilities on most Unix boxes". That seems to be much of the staying power it has, and is steadily becoming less true as other clients advance to fill the void. I mean, we're not talking about the window manager flavor of the week, or SpamAssassin, or the Linux development branch when it's in kernel of the week mode. Things like BIND, Sendmail, and Apache all have regular feature upgrades... and due to Debian's policies on stable (which are otherwise perfectly sane and reasoanble), we end up with badly outdated versions of even such slow-change tools. A private conversation had a rather telling comment in it, the other day; another developer noted that much of the pressure to actually get a release out the door seems to have vanished, with the advent of 'testing'; most developers run at least that, on any workstation, and there were significant numbers of servers upgraded to it during the final months of Woody's preparation, because it was more feasible to track the updates and manually watch for security fixes than it was to try to update all of the software that needed to be updated from a potato system with software two years out of date. -- *************************************************************************** Joel Baker System Administrator - lightbearer.com lucifer@lightbearer.com http://users.lightbearer.com/lucifer/
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