On Tue, Mar 29, 2005 at 05:08:32PM -0500, Noah Meyerhans wrote:
On Wed, Mar 30, 2005 at 07:16:31AM +1000, David Pastern wrote:
And this, in reality, is why Woody is so old. I cannot imagine any
other distro providing such an old kernel.
You've got cause and effect mixed up. Debian is not outdated *because*
we support ancient versions of software. We support ancient versions of
software because we are outdated. No distribution provides support for
their development branch before their stable branch.
It may be noticed that other distributions are switching to a longer
release cycle for "commercial/enterprise" products. Mandrake is to
switch to one release a year (and they don't commit to support for old
releases for more than about a year), Novell/SUSE are moving to an 18
month release cycle and five year support, Red Hat are moving to 18
month/two year cycle and seven year support. Given the effort that it
takes to support something through even two years of hardware change -
Debian is actually doing "the right thing" for support by releasing on
its current release cycle and the big distributions will soon start to
feel the pain of extended support cycles as well. Debian point
releases when they come fix security and other issues. Potato had seven
- one a couple of weeks before the new release. Woody has had four and a
fifth is in preparation.