Re: What's wrong with debian?
On Mon, 28 Feb 2005, Michael Marsh wrote:
> On Mon, 28 Feb 2005 22:50:50 +0100, Jan Lühr <jluehr@gmx.net> wrote:
> > What's preventing the sarge release? What blocks it for more than one year?
>
> Sometimes things take longer than you think they're going to,
> especially if you want to do them correctly.
Hi Michael. What sort of things do you mean?
I think the release cycle should be no more than 2 years, including code
freeze. So the code should freeze after 18 months at most allowing plenty
of time for stabilisation.
I don't want to put down all the good work done by the Debian developers
but as far as I'm concerned the release cycle is so slow it is just
getting silly.
We rarely if ever deploy Debian any more (whereas it used to be our
preferred distro) because Woody is just too old for many situations.
Sarge isn't even in code freeze afaik (please correct me if it is[1]). I
may drop a few boxes internally once Sarge has been frozen for a while but
installation at client sites will have to wait for the Sarge stable
release. Given that the code freeze is 6 months and that the proposed
September 2004 release date came and went long ago I believe I cannot
reasonably be expecting to be able to do this until sometime in late 2005
or maybe even early 2006.
IMHO the best way to approach the release cycle is to aim to make it
fairly regular (12-18 months would be ideal) with modest aims. The _only_
significant criticism I hear about Debian is the age of the stable
version. If it was not for this I believe it would have a far large share
of Linux installations to its name. It's got the stability and the
integration people want. I think it is possible to make a distro this
good with a more regular release cycle as long as the targets for each new
major release are modest.
[1] I have RTFMed this so if it does turn out to be frozen the info is not
being communicated well.
Rob
--
Robert Brockway B.Sc.
Senior Technical Consultant, OpenTrend Solutions Ltd.
Phone: 416-669-3073 Email: rbrockway@opentrend.net http://www.opentrend.net
OpenTrend Solutions: Reliable, secure solutions to real world problems.
Contributing Member of Software in the Public Interest (http://www.spi-inc.org)
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