Re: Debian - Release Cadence Options
On Thu, Oct 16, 2025 at 12:00:11PM -0400, Greg McPherran wrote:
I certainly understand the stable model. However, if I may suggest
considering a cadence option similar to Ubuntu and Fedora that provide
an official release every 6 months or so.
The release cadence is basically driven by what's practical given the
resources Debian has. We've managed a two-year cadence pretty reliably
for 20 years now. It's easy to think of benefits of a faster cadence,
but a faster cadence would also incur at least the following extra
problems:
* it would be more difficult to organize larger projects that need to
be completed in a single release cycle (e.g. the 64-bit time_t
transition in trixie)
* freezes would need to be much quicker in order that developers have
time to do ordinary work in non-frozen periods, which would require
more people to fix release-critical bugs even more aggressively than
we already do
* teams that are heavily involved in the release process (release,
archive management, installer, etc.) would have more frequent work to
do and would get fewer breaks
* offering an equivalent security support period with more frequent
stable releases would multiply the work that the security team has to
do, since more stable releases would have to be supported at once
Canonical solves some of these problems for Ubuntu by paying more people
to do things (although I can certainly tell you from personal experience
that this doesn't make the resulting burnout go away). I assume Red Hat
does similarly for Fedora. There are people paid to work at least some
of the time on Debian, but it isn't really the same model and Debian's
own resources would not stretch to very much of that on an ongoing
basis. So you're pretty much left with the established compromise that
Debian's core teams have found to be sustainable over the long haul.
I'm not sure what it would take to change that, but I doubt it would be
any single simple change.
Regards,
--
Colin Watson (he/him) [cjwatson@debian.org]
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