Re: 1 year release good enough.
On Sun, 01 Jan 2012, dE . wrote:
> I was wondering about the 2 year release cycle of Debian and it's
> adaptability on the Desktops.
We cannot do 1 year, it is not enough time to get hard things done
(remember: Debian is _very large_), and still freeze for enough time to
get things right.
1.5 years is probably doable, maybe.
> You have to admit that Debian is not used used much on the Desktops
It is the basis of several widely-used desktop distros, and an important
part of Ubuntu.
> -- it appears to be more popular for servers; and the 2 year release
> cycle is good for servers; increasing the release cycles to a higher
The 2 year release cycle is good for _us_ to get it ready for a stable
release, it is not that large because of servers at all...
> On the desktops however, in the above context, things differ completely.
> There's new hardware available always; within a period of 2 years,
We refresh hardware support every year (stable-and-a-half), although to
a more limited extent than we do in the testing/unstable distros.
> As a consequence, I suggest a sub-stable branch who's release cycle
> will be 1 year. As compared to the stable branch, this branch should
Maybe you can morpth this to a deep-stable-freeze-like stabilization of
key parts of the distro taken from testing and backported to -stable
(X.org, kernel, some other stuff) in order to reduce freeze surface, in
order to make the stable-and-a-half releases still just as safe, but
more useful to the desktop...
I think that's a more realistic goal, with better chances of
implementation. The key word here is to work with a reduced set of
packages that will be allowed large updates and therefore will require
the usual extreme amounts of testing we do before a stable release.
--
"One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
Henrique Holschuh
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