Greg Madden wrote:
On Monday 28 February 2005 01:14 pm, Jan Lühr wrote:Greetings,... Am Montag, 28. Februar 2005 22:56 schrieb William Ballard:On Mon, Feb 28, 2005 at 10:50:50PM +0100, Jan Lühr wrote:What's preventing the sarge release? What blocks it for more than one year?For what it's worth, I haven't had to reformat/reinstall any totally horked Sid installs since the fall. My little world is pretty stable. It "smells ready" to me.Of course, your argumentation is quite justified, but it didn't answer my question. What's wrong with debian?Nothing, except someone was bold enough to predict a finish date that was missed, I would just say it is ready when it is finished, not bad for volunteers working on a a non-commercial distro, that supports 11? arch's. Acceptance is a wonderful thing.
I agree. There are three basic resources available for any software endeavor (though this applies to other areas as well): cost, schedule, and features. In most cases, cost is fixed. This is because of the old addage: "Adding more people to a late project makes it later." (Read "The Mythical Man Month"[0] for a full explanation). Thus, that leaves to resources which can vary: schedule and features. For example, at Microsoft. they (try to) fix schedule and sacrifice features as necessary. (This is not a typical let's flame Microsoft for shoddy practices. This comes from the book "Microsoft Secrets"[1] written from an extensive case study at Microsoft by the authors.) On the other hand, Debian, and most Free and Open Source software projects, are unwilling to compromise on features and instead vary schedule. This becuase we find features more important and we are not trying to beat comptetiors to market. We are just trying to make good software that we can use. While it may get a bit tired having to limp along with Woody (realizing that in most cases where it is already delpoyed in production it does just fine) or undertaking the effort of self-supporting security in Sarge, I would rather have that than buggy software. Does anyone remember back when RedHat released gcc 2.96[2]? Or how about when a vendor "released" Debian[3] before it was ready? Personally, I want the project to wait until it is really ready. -Roberto [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month [1] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?MicrosoftSecrets [2] http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-2.96.html [3] http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/ch-releases.en.html -- Roberto C. Sanchez http://familiasanchez.net/~sanchezr
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