(note: I am speaking as a Debian developer and 5 year Debian user) On Mon, Oct 22, 2001 at 10:36:24PM -0400, Paul M Foster wrote: > I realize that the all-volunteer nature of Debian means that testing and > such take much longer. And that the testing results in a more stable > distro. I believe that to be a lame excuse. I think the real problem is that there is not much actual coordination of what will go into the next release. Debian doesn't set release goals. The development process is typically more like "Ready. Set. CODE!" and you're off, hacking on unstable until the release manager starts talking about a freeze. FreeBSD, another free OS development group that I'm in touch with, has made 3 stable releases since Debian last made one. FreeBSD is, like Debian, essentially all volunteer (there are a few people in each organization who work full time on project-related stuff). FreeBSD, like Debian, has a strong reputation for stability, security, and reliability. I believe that being so outdated actually harms the Debian development process. There are "unofficial" packages available for running things like X Free86 4.x and kernel 2.4.x with potato. These unofficial packages are put together by Debian developers. Couldn't these peoples' time better be spent actually working on official project related tasks rather than propping up an outdated release in order to hold people over until a new one can be pushed out? I am not sure what needs to change. I am not sure it's even worth talking about what needs to change, because there's no sign that the release manager is open to discussion of the matter. > > So I guess my question is: what do you other Debian users do to resolve > the long lead times for Debian releases? > Some people run woody. I have it on one of my machines. Some people take a potato system and install the unofficial packages to run kernel 2.4.x or X 4.x on potato. I've done this on several systems. It's also possible to get the source to a given package and build it locally (apt-get -b source <foo>). This often takes a bit of tweaking, since some of the Debian build environment has changed between potato and woody, but the results are usually quite good. noah -- _______________________________________________________ | Web: http://web.morgul.net/~frodo/ | PGP Public Key: http://web.morgul.net/~frodo/mail.html
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