Re: support for merged /usr in Debian
On Fri, 08 Jan 2016 21:20:21 +1100, Brian May <bam@debian.org> wrote:
>Marc Haber <mh+debian-devel@zugschlus.de> writes:
>> Keep support for things that used to work for, say, at least three or
>> four stable releases, document that and commit to it. And, of course,
>> stick to it.
>
>So at approx 2 years per stable release, that would be around 6 to 8
>years before we could get this optional change into Debian.
No, you can opt to change right now. Just don't force others to do it.
>Or maybe you can see into the future, and can see a time when the new
>/usr will be mandatory for all users. Maybe this is your concern. You
>want a commitment for it to remain optional for at least 6 to 8 years.
yes.
>Do we want debian to be slow and conservative or fast and bleeding edge?
Conservative enough to stay useable for professional IT operations. At
last this is what I want Debian to be. We are already losing behind
the Enterprise Distributions because they look on paper as if one can
install and forget for ten years.
>I would find 6 to 8 years far too long myself, by the time we get
>changes in a stable release, it is likely they will already be obsolete
>and replaced by something better. It would probably result in Debian
>being forked by people who want to develop using the latest standards
>but unable to do so in Debian.
Debian has already been forked by people who found Debian's release
cycles too long. The result is called Ubuntu, and we lost many of the
users (and developers!) who want shorter release cycles to them.
Now, we aim for shorter release cycles ourselves, which won't bring
any of the users back we lost to Ubuntu. But it'll make us now lose
the users that think we release too often to the Enterprise Linuxes.
That's what happens when one blindly follows users' wishes while
neglecting old values.
>Maybe what you are looking for is LTS support or extended LTS support on
>our releases?
Maybe. Having this is also blindly doing what others do while we did
so fine in the past.
Greetings
Marc
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