On Mon, Mar 29, 2004 at 06:06:53PM -0600, Steve Greenland wrote: > The Developers *are* Users. Even if there are only 900 Debian users, if > it's the right 900, then Debian will keep being useful. > > Of course, there are *lots* of developers who do care about releases, > and doing things that make it easier/better for non-developers, and so > forth. But there are some who don't, and as long as they don't interfere > with those who do, I don't see the problem. Debian taking as long as it does between releases seems to cause a morale problem among some developers, with their response being either to quit, as some have, or to ignore releases entirely since there is very little they can do about the problem. Once developers are demoralized fixing bugs to get something into sarge becomes less of a priority to them especially since no one has any idea when even a freeze is going to occur. Without a freeze things such as new library packages breaking existing packages are still acceptable, so their efforts to get bugfree packages into sarge go unrewarded... Until the Debian release structure becomes more rigid there is little hope that the current situation will ever improve. IMHO since the other dists are hitting 6mo targets reguarly Debian should at least strive for 1yr releases. Chris various dist release stats: Debian 1.3 - Jun 2, 1997 Debian 2.0 - Jul 24, 1998 (12 mo ) hamm Debian 2.1 - Mar 9, 1999 ( 8 mo ) slink Debian 2.2 - Aug 15, 2000 (17 mo ) potato Debian 3.0 - Jul 19, 2002 (23 mo ) woody Debian 3.1 - Jun ??, 2004 (24 mo+) sarge Debian 3.2 - May ??, 2006 (24 mo+) sarge+1 <- Do we really want that? RedHat 6.2 - Mar 27, 2000 (6 mo) RedHat 7 - Sep 25, 2000 (6 mo) RedHat 7.1 - Apr 16, 2001 (7 mo) RedHat 7.2 - Oct 22, 2001 (6 mo) RedHat 7.3 - May 6, 2002 (5 mo) RedHat 8 - Sep 30, 2002 (5 mo) RedHat 9 - Mar 31, 2003 (6 mo) Fedora 1 - Nov 6, 2003 (6 mo) Fedora 2 - May 10, 2004 (6 mo?) Fedora 3 - Nov ??, 2004 (6 mo?) RHEL 2.1 - May 6, 2002 RHEL 3.0 - Oct 22, 2003 (16 mo) <- Note RHEL is supported for 5 years.
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature