Re: 1 year release good enough.
On 01/01/12 19:46, Josselin Mouette wrote:
Le dimanche 01 janvier 2012 à 11:51 +0530, dE . a écrit :
I was wondering about the 2 year release cycle of Debian and it's
adaptability on the Desktops.
This is bullshit. Desktop systems don’t have specific release cycle
needs. Also note that the most popular desktop operating system uses a
release cycle of 3 years, not 1 year.
You might not have known, but the LTS release is not often used much....
You have to admit that Debian is not used used much on the Desktops --
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 amount is
also not bad when it comes to servers. Cause servers don't have to care
much about hardware compatibility and changes in protocols/formats
following the limited amount of task they do, or they don't require
periodic updates to installed software.
This is bullshit. Server hardware can change just as much as desktop
hardware. Actually, it is becoming more and more the same hardware.
When you sell server hardware, you don't sell it assuming it'll be
running on Windows. You assume it'll run on both Windows and Linux --
since Debian is one of the most popular server OS why wont the
manufactures think about it?
On the desktops however, in the above context, things differ completely.
There's new hardware available always; within a period of 2 years, the
generation of hardware changes requiring new drivers.
How is that different from servers?
Why not just try to plug a Windows phone on your Debian desktop? Just in
case Windows phone does monopolize the market, developers will be
provided reverse engineered drivers which might require new libraries.
State of hardware compatibility of Linux on desktop is not as good.
An upgrade of X drivers is yet more complicated, not to mention
backporting ATI and Nvidia drivers become yet more complicated and often
impossible in a system more than 1 year old.
Again more bullshit. In reality, proprietary drivers are much easier to
backport, and there’s been significant progress for free drivers too.
I might have been wrong here so ok....
Apart from hardware compatibility, newer standards (like HTML 5, h265,
document formats etc...) are a necessity for a the Desktops but
backporing the corresponding program may not be possible because of very
old libraries.
*Very old*? Please.
Ok, I'll given e.gs. For starters, try compiling GIT ffmpeg on one of
the stable boxes.... Hay, that's the official ffmpeg way...
Further, Desktop systems dont require that much of stability and
reliability and even security many times.
This is the sentence with the highest bullshit density in your bullshit
email. The largest security threat in today’s computing is certainly the
terminal, as it is subject to a large amount of communication with a
wide range of data of various sensibilities, making it the easiest way
to expose sensible data from an open network. Desktops are the devices
which require the most security attention, and in the next years this is
going to shift to embedded devices as they start accessing an even wider
range of data.
What about attack surface? Desktops are issues cause most people use
Windows, and we ain't talking bullshit OSs here.
A server is on day and night increasing the attack surface -- still
worst, it has to listen and respond to queries which may be malformed to
trigger a vulnerability. But Desktops have file wall installed -- they
take no queries.
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 be more
flexible to upgrades and even downgrades -- our objective should be to
include the software version in the sub-stable branch which apparently
have the least bugs and other critical issues -- for e.g. KDE 4.7 has a
lot of new small bugs as compared to 4.6 -- I've to say KDE 4.6 was
better in terms of number of bugs, thus the sub-stable branch should
continue to include the 4.6 release of KDE. If a major upstream bugs or
issue is found in a package, it'll be upgraded.
If you knew how our release process worked, you would understand this is
bullshit too. Such proposals have been debated again and again over the
years, and were never found useful.
Ok, but where? -
http://lists.debian.org/cgi-bin/search?query=1+year&DEFAULTOP=and&author=&list=debian-project&sort=relevance&HITSPERPAGE=10&language=en
http://lists.debian.org/cgi-bin/search?query=reduce+release&DEFAULTOP=and&author=&list=debian-project&sort=relevance&HITSPERPAGE=10&language=en
Wait, maybe I'm missing keywords...
You are not looking for a distribution for desktops. You are looking for
a distribution with the most recent software. There are various devices
on which one could need this, including desktops, servers and embedded
devices. Usually, you don’t do this on production systems, though - and
that includes production desktops. No, I’m not talking about the
computer you have at home with only 2 users.
Yes -- the kind of people who are targeted here might be happier with
stable.
Since there's a new branch, there'll be additional loads on the
developers (backports and all that), I suggest the unstable branch be
demolished (I'm not clear about it's role though) and increase the
migration time from experimental to testing.
If you don’t even know what unstable is for, what the hell are you
babbling about?
Right -- I'll look out for this.
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