What's wrong with debian?
Greetings,
I've been following debian for years - potato was the first release I actually
used on productive machines.
When potato was released, release periods of two years were discussed. And two
years later woody was released.
However, the release of woody was promised a few times, before it was actually
released.
And today?
Following debian-announce just _one_ message was posted in 2004.[1]
In 2003 the list was a little bit alive. Some stuff about the server
compromise and two, instead of one woody-re-releases.
Sarge was announced and expected in mid 2004.
The progress in sarge is measurebale, but that seems to be all.
More than one year ago, a timeline for a sarge base-freeze was announced [3]
and debian-installer should receive last minute fixes only in mid-march 2004
and go into beta testing.
Now we'll probably see d-i rc3 in march 2005.[4]
In March 2004, Sarge was expected in June 2004 [5], but we all know, the
release didn't happen.
In Aug 2004 Sarge was expected in Sep 2004, but we all know, the release
didn't happen.[7]
But blaming d-i is quite unfair, because the security part (for instance(!))
also had/have some difficulties.[6]
Thus for a while the release was planed refering to the status of the sec part
[8]
And yet?
Following the different announce-lists, for an user like me, the current
release status updates look more or less like the ones one year before (Of
course, d-i rc3 sounds better than beta3, but that's all).
For other distros like ubuntu, netbsd, gentoo and com. distros like suse and
red-hat release schedules are not a big problem) ...
So, well, what's wrong with debian?
What's preventing the sarge release? What blocks it for more than one year?
On the one hand this question seems to be quite naive, and I don't wanna start
an "Who do you want to blame today" campaign but on the other hand
following different lists and forums, questions like "can I use Sarge instead
of woody" or "is sarge ready for production use" are quite popular. Seeing to
the participants eys, their concerns and arguments seem to justified in some
way. And besides of the robustness of a well tested system, the age of woody
makes it unuseable in some situations.
The security support for woody is in no better shape. Sec-support for mozilla
has been given up[9], and the all important, already promised kernel-updates
have been missing for months [10]. (Of course using sid's kernel source is
quite a good work-around - but hey, it's a work-around) ...
Dear reader,
thanks for your patience while reading through my lines - and maybe for
following my cross-references at the end of this mail.
I'm using sarge on some less important production servers and the changes in
sarge are sometimes painfull and cause some troubles.
Perhaps you may explain to me: "What's wrong with debian?".
(Hope to) Keep smiling
yanosz
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-announce/debian-announce-2004/threads.html
[2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-announce/debian-announce-2003/threads.html
[3] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2004/02/msg00009.html
[4] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005/02/msg00010.html
[5] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2004/03/msg00026.html
[6] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2004/09/msg00005.html
[7] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2004/08/msg00003.html
[8] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2004/11/msg00003.html
[9] http://lists.debian.org/debian-security/2004/03/msg00086.html
[10] http://lists.debian.org/debian-security/2005/01/msg00070.html
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