Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes

http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090729

by JeremyChase • 17 years ago

60 14 17 years ago

davidw3• 17 years ago

Great news, and about time. I am not sure about a two year cycle though... that might be a bit too long for what I want as a user. But with such a big project, anything shorter might be difficult to accomplish, too. Anyway, it's a welcome direction: it's difficult to base things on a system that's not predictable.

JeremyChase• 17 years ago

Historically, they have released almost every two years anyway. Potato and Woody are the only exceptions (1 year and 3 years). So it makes sense to me to shift it.

http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/ch-release...

davidw3• 17 years ago

Sure, but stating that as a goal is quite different from "have mostly done so".

ars• 17 years ago

This is great, except I wish it was one year.

After about 1 year I start having a significant number of packages from testing, and it gets more and more troublesome. In particular security updates become hard to separate from the usual churn of testing. And most of the packages from testing are not even packages I want, but rather dependencies pulled in automatically.

davidw3• 17 years ago

As I alluded to below, I think with that large a project, that's done almost entirely by volunteers, one year just isn't enough turnaround.

wglb2• 17 years ago

But OpenBSD does it on a six month basis. I am wondering if it is more the degree of organization and planning rather than the size of the project.

artificer2• 17 years ago

Each stable version of Debian is maintained for one year after the release of the next. Unless this policy changes, this means that the next releases will be supported for a minimum of three years. If the releases were yearly, as you wish, there would be only two years of security support, which would hurt precisely those users that want long term support and use Debian stable.

blasdel• 17 years ago

How about not freezing the vast majority of packages at all?

A huge amount of their effort is spent doing pointless crap like freezing versions of 10,000 end-user software packages, and backporting updates with the features stripped out.

It's totally reasonable to freeze versions of the kernel, glibc, xorg, dbus, etc. every 18 months or so. It makes some sense to regularly freeze heavily-interdependent meta-packages like Gnome or KDE, since their release model matches up. It's ridiculously stupid to freeze Firefox that way.

mariana• 17 years ago

Not all Debian developers agree with this "decision" anyway. They are right now discussing it. See: http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2009/07/msg00148.html

artificer2• 17 years ago

Looks like a nice decision, however I also feel that Debian's problem is the huge freeze of thousands of packages, making the 'stable' ('stale' is better for some) distribution out of date quickly while adding a large burden to it's developers and maintainers. This blog post by the author of Ion window manager sums it all up better than I could:

http://modeemi.fi/~tuomov/b/archives/2007/03/03/T19_15_26/

Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes

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