Lenny’s release date III
Two months since my last status update of my initial guess for Lenny’s release date, time for an update:
I don’t know what the current “official” release target for Lenny is, but I still think we’re heading towards Spring/Summer 2009.
The last related mail on -devel-announce is from October 2008 from Alexander who hopes that we’ll release Lenny at least by the end of 2008. I’ve read an article with an interview with Steve McIntyre somewhere on The Register where he said:
“Bastian’s being a little bit pessimistic based on the data he’s looking at, but as far as I know, he hasn’t spoken to any of the release team. As far as Lenny goes, we’re ‘almost’ there,” he told The Register.
That interview was in the beginning of October.
It doesn’t bother me too much, that we release late. What bothers me is that we don’t correct our estimated release dates even when it’s obvious that there is no way we will release in time. It’s really sad that we keep our users in the dark about the fact that we can’t release in time until it’s already too late.
I believe many users would appreciate if we’d honestly say: We don’t know when we release, but currently we have x RC bugs open and looking at the last releases we think it will take roughly n months to fix them and release, instead of the good old “We release when it’s ready”.
Another important point: Unstable is frozen for almost five months now. If you buy a current laptop, chances are hight that it might not fully work with Debian “bleeding edge” unstable, since it’s horrible outdated. Some of the newer stuff can be obtained from experimental if you’re brave enough, but if you’re not, unstable is getting more and more unattractive compared to other distribution’s current versions. This is really something we should try to fix after we released Lenny.
December 9th, 2008 at 7:04 pm
what kind of curve fitting algorithm did you use? It looks rather off. The blue line for sarge looks clearly steeper than the bug graph. The blue line for lenny look clearly more shallow.
December 9th, 2008 at 9:50 pm
Agreed. Both on the ETA and the need for a living unstable in frozen periods.
December 9th, 2008 at 10:47 pm
I agree with you, it can really be a problem to have sid frozen more time each release. I was wondering if it might be possible to do the releases without freezing everything, maybe by considering stable a special case of Debian Custom Distribution (now Debian Pure Blend) or something like that. Another possibility would be to have Debian divided into different standalone blocks of packages with their own release time each of them. In any case a solution must be found, because the surrent system is not really too scalable.
December 10th, 2008 at 8:51 am
How many RC bugs have you fixed today?
December 10th, 2008 at 9:33 pm
I really agree that unstable is now frozen far too long and I am happy to here that there are thoughts to change this for future releases.
Moving the release date seems not to be a big problem to me, though honesty is appreciated.
December 11th, 2008 at 9:40 am
The problem of long Unstable freezes is not just a matter of being brave enough or not. Recently, Unstable got promoted to Testing - http://ekaia.org/blog/2008/11/27/faq-about-kde-42-in-debian/ so currently there’s *no* way of getting a hold on some bleeding edge stuff (KDE 4.2beta anyone?), no matter how brave the user.
December 11th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
@rufusD:
That is not accurate, I do not think we would have uploaded a KDE 4.2 pre-release yet even if experimental were “empty”. Basically because we lack of manpower and it is not still fully packaged and polished.
So saying stuff like unstable is the new testing and stuff like that based on my blog post is far from a good argument!
Ana
December 11th, 2008 at 10:50 pm
In a way it’s good to have Sid frozen: it causes pressure for the whole community to fix RC bugs from testing. So go fix the RC bugs and you’ll have upload-free Sid again.
I do my best too.
December 12th, 2008 at 3:51 pm
Hello,
the Debian developers are doing a good job. But such a long freeze is really annoying. I am using unstable all the time, but because of the freeze now i have to use experimental to get an partial up to date environment.
As a user i never use stable, because it is already outdated when released. Etch is shipped with GNOME 2.14 but at this time GNOME 2.18 was already two months old. The same for the kernel shipped with 2.6.18 but again the version 2.6.20 was already two months old.
If you are right two years later again an outdated stable version will be released. Right now in Lenny a GNOME 2.22 (this not correct nautilus and gnome-panel will stay at 2.20) and a kernel 2.6.26 will be shipped. In June 2009 GNOME 2.26 and kernel 2.6.29 or 2.6.30 will be current.
I hope after Lenny such a long freeze will never happen again.
January 7th, 2009 at 2:52 pm
@dirk- You’re missing the point of stable, I think. The point of stable is not to have the latest bleeding edge packages, but to provide a stable bug-free environment. What has made Debian Debian is that the developers work tirelessly with upstream to get the distribution rock-solid. There just doesn’t exist a more stable GNU/Linux distribution than Debian stable. It has everything to do with long freezes. The longer the freeze, the more RC bugs can be squashed on the current feature freeze, and the stable the operating system becomes. As you are aware, if you want the latest packages, then run unstable or experimental.
January 25th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
Indeed the major problem (for me, at least) is the unstable freeze. Not just new hardware support. Even if hardware is supported, the old software packages do a really bad PR to Debian.
KDE 3.5, OpenOffice 2.4, WordPress 2.5, those are becoming older and older.
January 29th, 2009 at 2:49 pm
@Aaron: I do not think that i missed the point of stable. I know that stable should be rock-solid. But as stable is already outdated (but rock-solid) when released i would never suggest a newbie to use Debian! For example with my EeePC 701 lenny is not a really good choice, because of the old kernel and old GNOME.
I am aware of this and so i am using unstable on my desktop. But due to the freeze unstable is outdated too which is annoying. Because of this now i am using experimental too. But for example liferea 1.5.8 should be in experimental and 1.4.23 in unstable. Due to the freeze 1.4.23 had to go to experimental.
I am using Debian since Hamm, because it was the first distribution which was shipped with libc6. But next time when i will do a fresh install i am not sure that it will be Debian again.