On 07/14/2008 04:18 PM, Paul Johnson wrote:
I'm not suggesting that they're the same, I'm suggesting that by making backports official it would be self defeating (why not just update stable?) and complicate things for developers (now they have two stable packages to follow). There's a time and a place for backports, but to make it an official part of Debian would be complicated for developers and confusing for users.
I agree. The whole Debian system, which I applaud, is already too confusing. However, the flexibility Debian gives us in selecting software packages and repositories allows us to have pretty much whatever distribution we want.
And if someone wants to support exotic combinations of packages and features with security support--more power to them, but that should be done outside of the Debian organization.
And most definitely, Debian does not need to come out with a new distribution. There are already /way/ too many distributions of Linux, and there are /six/ distributions of Debian in common use: Sid, Lenny, Etch, Sarge, Woody and Potato.
Creating new distributions just for marketing purposes is silly. If that works to make Mark Shuttleworth another several million dollars--good for him, but Debian doesn't need to mimic that behavior. Debian is a serious Linux O/S meant for serious and knowledgeable people. Here, we don't need to trick people into buying three installations CD's that are really all the same O/S but with different install defaults. Our users have not been dumbed-down that much, and they should never be.