Debian's progress inspite of events (was Re: Dunk-Tank and the DD strike)
On Wed, 2007-03-14 at 10:16 -0800, Bill wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-14-03 at 12:35 -0400, Greg Folkert wrote:
> > Etch being release on April 2, 2007 (tentative per last nights
> > announcements) is EONs ahead of Sarge's and Woody's release cycles.
> > It'll only be about 4-5 months late. Consider less than 2 years for
> > Etch. Sarge was HOW Long? And How long was Woody? I believe you'd have
> > to go back to Slink to be only 4-5 months late. Or maybe farther back.
>
> This is good news. And it is NEWS!
>
> Release before the election is the best of all possible worlds.
>
> No I wasn't pushing for a deadline and Etch is the fruit of a vastly
> improved process. My concern was that we would lapse into one of the
> former situations. I guess it's been more a question of perception
> than fact.
Let us go into the archive:
Hamm released: July 24th, 1998
Slink released: March 9th, 1999
Potato released: August 14th, 2000
Woody released: July 19th, 2002
Sarge released: June 6th, 2005
Etch tentative release: April 2nd, 2007
And from what I can tell reading in the archive:
Hamm was weeks late.
Slink was a few months late.
Potato was a few months late.
Woody was quite late.
Sarge was so late, that things happened, including:
Ubuntu taking shape.
Many Debian Developers becoming MIA or just abandoning
Debian
Hosting companies disallowing Debian as an available
distro
Other minor things having a bigger impact now
Not to pick on Sarge though, many, many break-through items came about
in Sarge, not least of which, the Installer was fantastically improved.
Much package and software policy was clarified and improved upon. QA was
expanded and improved in procedure. Discoveries of deficiencies that
could only be changed Sarge+1. Automation of many critical services for
the benefit of Debian's Infrastructure. Ubuntu benefiting from these
changes. Eventually a two-way exchange between Debian and Ubuntu
developed... many other things.
So, now we come to Etch, many would like to get Debian back to a 9-12
month release schedule. It would be nice, but the new process might not
allow for such to happen. For one thing the "freeze" is to long and some
methods of getting things done have been "controversial" at best.
So, as you can see, perception is indeed not related to fact with
Debian's progress being reported by the Media that only pickup on the
bad things. If they really reported fairly, things like this really
wouldn't be appearing to happen suddenly. But as we all know, touchy
feel good stories don't attract viewers or subscribers (or slashdotters
or diggers or redditers or <insert favorite social networking site>)
Cheers, muchly.
--
greg, greg@gregfolkert.net
Novell's Directory Services is a competitive product to Microsoft's
Active Directory in much the same way that the Saturn V is a competitive
product to those dinky little model rockets that kids light off down at
the playfield. -- Thane Walkup
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