On 2004-06-23, John Summerfield penned:
I have been to www.apt-get.org and I got Mozilla from here, pine from
there, KDE from somewhere else, Xfree from another... Do you get the
picture?
Well, just to be pedantic, you wouldn't find pine anywhere in debian
because of its licensing terms.
A coordinated, official system of official backports would be a fine
thing, and the workforce to do it is already there - they're the
people making these unofficial backports.
Yes, but there's no way to test those backports thoroughly enough to
match the amount of testing that went into stable in the first place.
Until Red Hat Linux 8.0, Red Hat had two cycles of releases:
Major numbers, 5.x, 6.x, 7.x maintained binary compatibility. Those
came out with about the same frequencies as Debian releases.
And the dot-oh releases were well known to be buggy piles of crap.
There was always some nasty gotcha lurking in the system. I don't know
why that was the case, but it definitely held true from at least 4 to 6,
maybe 7. Somewhere in there I stopped having to care because I switched
to Debian.
Then there were the minor releases, x.[0-3] coming out at about
six-monthly intervals. One could take a package from x.2 and install
it with minimal bother on x.0 or x.1, with every expectation of not
breaking anything.
It's a model Debian would do well to look at and see how it can adapt
it, adopt it. Using this model, Sarge would be 4.0, not 3.1 because it
breaks binary compatibility (new gcc, new glibc).
It sounds like a lot more work for the developers. RedHat had
commercial customers to support their developers. How would you suggest
Debian manage this?