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Re: "I do consider Ubuntu to be Debian" , Ian Murdock



anoop aryal wrote:
On Thursday 29 March 2007 14:55, Steve Lamb wrote:
anoop aryal wrote:
i'll take etch when it's good and ready and not a day before. i'd rather
have a working OS, free of bugs, late than a half baked, bug-ridden POS,
on time.
    Then you'll be waiting forever because even Debian does not ship stable
releases "free" of bugs.

touche.

but my main argument is that i value debian prioratizing bug-squashing over meeting release dates. and that if debian is guilty of being cavalier about missing release dates, others are guilty of being cavalier about releasing bug-riddled software (knowingly).

i switched from windows to redhat (around '96), then from redhat to fedora, then from fedora to debian. now that i'm here, i don't see myself switching to anything else. and that's *because* debian hasn't given in to the temptation of always having the latest and the greatest software and *because* when the new stable is out, i know there'll be minimum surprises. and that's because debian hasn't given in to meeting artificial release dates. as a software dev who does sysadmin only to setup an environment to run the software we develop, i really value the slow/steady releases because otherwise, we'll be on a hamster wheel of upgrades and have to constantly fix our apps to work with the newer system the whole time and not have the time to develop anything new. debian gives us a nice stable target to hit. i do use testing/unstable on my personal machines where i don't mind the occasional breakage - i see that as a chance to send in the occasional bug report to help out. and as a way to prepare for what may be coming down the pipe in the next release. but debian - the way it is - is exactly why i'm using it on servers.

so, yeah, given everything else stays the same, i'd take a firmer release date. but not at the expense of getting software that has critical bugs that could be fixed if the release date was moved. after all, if i was really itching for the newer software, all i'd have to do is 'sed -i "s/sarge/etch/g" /etc/apt/sources.list'. not like debian is stopping me from getting the software before it's magical "release" date.

just wanted to make sure that the powers that be also hear from people who appriciate the way things are done in debian.


I agree. I would much rather have Debian released when it is ready to be released, than released when an arbitrary time line has passed. I'll take stability and quality over "latest and greatest" every time in a server OS. I run Sid on my laptop and desktop, but not on any servers I install.


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