Comments on: Lenny’s release date III

By: dirk

dirk — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 13:49:22 +0000

@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 But as stable is already outdated (but rock-solid) when released i would never suggest a newbie to use Debian!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 But due to the freeze unstable is outdated too which is annoying.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.

By: Oren

Oren — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 11:03:49 +0000

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.

By: Aaron

Aaron — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 13:52:00 +0000

@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.

By: dirk

dirk — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 14:51:07 +0000

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As a user i never use stable, because it is already outdated when released.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If you are right two years later again an outdated stable version will be released.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.

By: 6th

6th — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 21:50:57 +0000

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.

By: Ana

Ana — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 12:41:21 +0000

@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

By: rufusD

rufusD — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 08:40:22 +0000

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.

By: ReedWood

ReedWood — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 20:33:35 +0000

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.

By: Np237

Np237 — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 07:51:21 +0000

How many RC bugs have you fixed today?

By: Miriam Ruiz

Miriam Ruiz — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 21:47:23 +0000

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.