> Still, I imagine a debian release between stable and unstable. Stable is > nice for the space shuttle or other critical purposes. But, let's say, the > netscape installer package: There's no bug in the old version. But I think > there should be a place outside the developers' corner for the new one ... > Somewhere, where dselect can be used. ? I've thought about this myself too. What would be nice is a "cutting edge, but reliable" distribution that was separate from the standard stable release. This could possibly be done by a different project than Debian (or even a company). It would be based on the standard stable major releases, and would be supplemented by more up-to-date packages from unstable. It would be fully tested, and released on a monthly basis. The Debian project doesn't really have what it takes to maintain two different streams of releases. All the developers run unstable, so very few of them have the environment (or the time) to make releases for both an unstable and a stable release. The people (or company) running this separate project would not have to concentrate on developing new software - but just integrate the cutting edge stuff into the stable release, testing it, and releasing it. They would probably have to make changes to many packages (ie. recompile for libc5, fix dependencies) in order for everything to work properly. This project could operate a separate bug system which would allow them to "intercept" bugs that are their own doing, and forward real bugs to the Debian maintainers. A project such as this would also be very beneficial to the regular Debian project and maintainers, since we could then concentrate on preparing a single "stable" release every 3-6 months. An additional bonus would be no more flamewars about stable release maintenance. It's difficult, if not impossible, for us (the Debian developers) to do well-tested and thought out releases on a tighter timetable than what we are doing for the major releases (3-6 months). This is due to the distributed, volunteer nature of the organization. But the packaging system itself can support a much tighter release schedule than what we are capable of. dpkg's system of dependencies and conflicts means that it is possible to support building releases and upgrading in a very piecemeal manner. A separate organization dedicated to building a "cutting edge, but reliable" distribution from the raw output from the Debian project could be very successful. Cheers, - Jim
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