On Wed, 2005-03-30 at 17:55 +1000, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote: > On Tue, Mar 29, 2005 at 05:08:32PM -0500, Noah Meyerhans wrote: > > On Wed, Mar 30, 2005 at 07:16:31AM +1000, David Pastern wrote: > > > And this, in reality, is why Woody is so old. I cannot imagine any > > > other distro providing such an old kernel. > > > > You've got cause and effect mixed up. Debian is not outdated *because* > > we support ancient versions of software. We support ancient versions of > > software because we are outdated. No distribution provides support for > > their development branch before their stable branch. > > > It may be noticed that other distributions are switching to a longer > release cycle for "commercial/enterprise" products. Mandrake is to > switch to one release a year (and they don't commit to support for old > releases for more than about a year), Novell/SUSE are moving to an 18 > month release cycle and five year support, Red Hat are moving to 18 > month/two year cycle and seven year support. Given the effort that it > takes to support something through even two years of hardware change - > Debian is actually doing "the right thing" for support by releasing on > its current release cycle and the big distributions will soon start to > feel the pain of extended support cycles as well. Debian point > releases when they come fix security and other issues. Potato had seven > - one a couple of weeks before the new release. Woody has had four and a > fifth is in preparation.
Yes, and i've long said that the 3 month/6 month releases by Redhat/Fedora/Suse/Mandrake are just plain silliness. However - there is a big difference between a one year release cycle, and the fact that it's been nearly 3 years since the release of Woody. That's a huge difference, that no amount of debate can hide. For a long while many Debian developers have ignored this, and people have moved from Debian to other distros like Mepis, Ubuntu, Libranet, Xandros, Linspire etc. I'm not saying that these distros are better, but many people seem to prefer them to the very slow movement of Debian Woody. I guess i'm looking at it from the point of view that I don't want to see Debian die. Whilst I use Libranet, and not pure Debian, i've used pure Debian in the past. An archaic installer, difficult post installation setup of even basic things, slow kernel support leading to difficulty in running newer technologies/devices led me to look elsewhere. I remember using Woody, and trying to grab kde 3. It was a bloody nightmare. I was lucky that I had a kind soul help me, and spend a fair bit of time helping me, otherwise i'd have just given up. > Our main concerns are a.) Our users b.) Free > software c.) Producing the best distribution we can d.) Across a range > of hardware in support of a. and b. leading to c. > > You want fast moving latest/greatest - switch your apt-get to > sid/unstable. You want tested software that is reasonably up to date - > switch to sarge/testing (soon sarge/stable). [Testing changes on a > fairly regular basis] You want rock solid > software you don't want to touch for six months - switch to woody/stable. > It really is that simple. Yup, my Libranet system is mostly sarge, with the odd woody package here and there (very few these days), some custom Libranet packages, and some Sid. It runs pretty stable, with the odd issue here and there. But hey, it's software, even the most stable piece of software can misbehave from time to time. > You can use pinning to pull in some packages from testing to stable or > whatever if you really must. Yeah, i'm doing that now :-) Libranet made that easier, i'm still a touch hesitant with things like pinning etc, although I understand more now than I did when I first started with woody. Like everything in life, you learn as you go. I've had this same argument with others, and I still think, even if you can pin to sarge/sid, that the releases for Debian are just too slow. Maybe for a server release, it's great, but for the average person, using it at home, it's not. Yearly releases would be fine in my eyes, that's not too short, and certainly a reasonable length. Of course the hard thing is getting the bug count down, and that takes competent users who can code. Sadly, my coding ability is about as good as a fly trying to stop a hurricane. > Just IMHO > > Andy > > Dave Proud Libranet GNU/Linux user Libranet The TOP Libranet distribution http://www.libranet.com/ Download your free trial of Libranet 2.8.1 today!
