On 4 Jan 2005, at 3:45 pm, Steve Greenland wrote:
On 04-Jan-05, 07:40 (CST), Paul van der Vlis <paul@vandervlis.nl> wrote:One of the biggest disadvantages of Debian for me is the long time it takes for a new stable version.If you want Ubuntu or Progeny, you know where[1] to find them. :-) Seriously. There's just no way you're going to change the way Debian makes releases, or rather, doesn't. It's too big, and there are just too damn many people involved, many of whom simply don't care about releases. As long as we maintain our current release criteria (which I don't necessarily think we should change) we will get slower and slower as we get bigger and bigger.
Which could be seen as a problem by some; but in some ways it's probably the way to go. As far as my own use of Debian goes, almost every machine I install runs testing, and has done for years. There's a level of protection in there thanks to the rules that are in place, and I rather like the incremental improvement approach as opposed to release-based.
With the trend as it is at the moment, the endpoint is that Debian will eventually stop releasing altogether (some end users probably think this has already happened!) and will essentially become an upstream, developer-oriented, steadily evolving distribution from which the likes of Ubuntu take regular snapshots for the masses to use.
The downside of this is that it will essentially bar Debian systems from being formally supported by independent software vendors, since stable releases are what they depend on.
Tim -- Dr Tim Cutts GPG: 1024/D FC81E159 5BA6 8CD4 2C57 9824 6638 C066 16E2 F4F5 FC81 E159
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