Re: equinoctial releases
On Wed, Sep 01, 2004 at 09:29:52PM +0100, Andrew Suffield
wrote:
>
> On Wed, Sep 01, 2004 at 01:38:21PM -0600, Thomas E.
> Vaughan wrote:
> >
> > I'm just an ordinary, long-time sid user,
Still, a *serious*, ordinary, long-time user, at least by my
accounting.
> > Nevertheless, it seems to me that debian should release
> > twice a year.
>
> No way.
Rats. And it would have been so cool to have a release
schedule described by the word, "equinoctial". Oh, well.
> That would be *horrible* for all the serious users.
It wouldn't be horrible for me, and I consider myself a
serious user. Moreover, I imagine that there are many like
me. Nevertheless, I agree that it would be inconvenient for
some, and I noted that in my original post.
> We would have to support the previous *two* releases,
> because upgrade == downtime and a large corporate
> environment won't tolerate upgrades more often than once a
> year, and would rather have them less frequent than that.
Right. Too bad there is no way to have a corporate release
once every two years and a regular release twice a year.
> Supporting two stable releases at once is not feasible. We
> have enough trouble with one.
>
> 12-18 months is a decent timeframe.
Then we could just squeeze in a "vernal equinox" release
every Mar 21 and still be decent. That could arguably be
called "equinoctial". :^)
> Any less is too fast. Anything up to 24 months is still
> comfortable. Longer and it starts to get annoying.
I don't know about "comfortable". I have used unstable on
most of my boxes continuously for years because the releases
come too infrequently. For me, it would be nice to use
stable and plan for down time, but (1) there's no predicting
when the next stable will come and (2) there are---especially
in the long stretch between releases---eventually
tools in unstable that I need.
As it is, down time comes like a thief in the night, but I
rationalize my use of unstable by thinking that it keeps my
skillz sharp. And it's really not so bad, because I've
never come across a problem that I couldn't fix or work
around in a couple of hours at most and because such a thing
doesn't happen very often.
--
Thomas E. Vaughan (303) 939-6386 Ball Aerospace, Boulder
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