Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments
Search

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Slashdot Log In

Log In

[ Create a new account ]

Debian Maintainer Hints At September Release for Lenny

Posted by timothy on Thu Jul 24, 2008 09:10 PM
from the mr-kravitz-unjustly-accused dept.
Debian Operating Systems Linux
nerdyH writes "The Debian project's maintainer, Luke Claes, announced in an email Saturday that he will freeze the 'testing' or 'Lenny' tree, in preparation for a new stable release of Debian Linux in ... September! The freeze means that open source software developers have only a couple more days to package any applications that they want to be included in the next release of Debian — and by extension, in the inner sanctum source lists of distributions such as Ubuntu that are based on it. After the freeze starts next week, Debian maintainers will turn their attention to 364 release-critical bugs, and half-a-dozen high-priority goals. Given the work to be done, is September really feasible? Lenny always was a little slow getting back to his right place ..."
debian linux os lenny
linux debian
story

Related Stories

Firehose:Next Debian release in... Sept?! by nerdyH (702091)
[+] Bugs Delay Release of Debian Lenny 227 comments
A. B. VerHausen writes to tell us that over 200 release-critical bugs continue to push back Debian Lenny's release date. Originally slated for a September release, there is still a long road to be traveled before Lenny sees the light of day. Project leader Steve McIntyre says they may consider dropping some packages for the release if they continue to cause problems, and while an end of October release is the goal, only time will tell.
[+] Debian Lenny Installer RC1 Arrives 43 comments
nerdyH writes "It appears that Debian 5.0 (aka "Lenny") will soon take its big binocular eyes out into the wider world. Only two months later than expected, the Debian project has completed the first release candidate of Lenny's installer. Featuring much faster installation from "live" CDs, and expanded support for ARM-based devices such as NAS servers, Lenny has gestated for 19 months, compared to 21 months for the previous "Etch" release. Lookout, world, Debian releases are picking up speed! The download is here."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

Debian Maintainer Hints At September Release for Lenny 25 Comments More | Login /

 Full
 Abbreviated
 Hidden
More | Login
Loading... please wait.

  • Packaging... meh. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by AllIGotWasThisNick (1309495) on Thursday July 24, @09:15PM (#24329303)

    only a couple more days to package any applications that they want to be included in the next release of Debian

    If you've left packaging until the freeze announcement, you don't deserve to be included.

  • Obligatory "does it matter?" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by neapolitan (1100101) * on Thursday July 24, @09:16PM (#24329309)

    I run Debian in several capacities -- stable on my work server, and unstable on my personal machine.

    A lot of people are going to (quite accurately, I guess) point out that for anybody running unstable/experimental there is not much to this. I mean, release numbers are soooo 1990's, as a simple apt-get update; apt-get upgrade brings you up to the latest packages. Even experimental seems to lag waaaay behind other bleeding edge distros though (gentoo).

    Of course, the release is more important for new installs or people running stable. I have been very impressed with Debian stable, the SSH bug nonwithstanding.

    As software packages and Linux get more mature, I see the definition of a "release" issue becoming even less important for the non-server / non-corporate user. Continuous upgrades are the way of the future. Even on the M$ side this seems to be true, with their MS office 200x and "automatic upgrades."

    Thoughts?

  • Will they keep the bug count artificially low? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SuperBanana (662181) on Thursday July 24, @09:58PM (#24329631)
    I've noticed that Debian, Mozilla, and Gentoo all have a nasty habit of saying, "that's not a bug!", and then when finally convinced:

    "Well. We can't look at it for THIS release." And then your perfectly valid bug is shuffled off into a nice category where it won't upset their bug count for the release effort.

    Note that the total number of bugs in Lenny is actually around 1800- only by a pretty fine comb have they been able to claim "only" 360 bugs.

    • There's a big difference between a release-critical bug (one that would basically ruin a whole release for everyone) and an annoyance (such as spewing diagnostic messages under certain circumstances on certain hardware).

      Ubuntu has stuck to its schedules by releasing with plenty of release-critical bugs still in the air, and fixing most of them in post-release updates. That's cool for getting a release out there, but it basically makes every official release feel like an RC1.

      • an annoyance (such as spewing diagnostic messages under certain circumstances on certain hardware).

        A system which spews diagnostic messages will fill up /var, and is far more than an "annoyance". If Debian Stable had such a bug, it would be inexcusable. People rely on it to run critical production systems.

        How often do we complain about vendors shipping buggy software? And look at the graph for bugs for stable- in the last few months, it's skyrocketed!

        Ubuntu has stuck to its schedules by releasing with plenty of release-critical bugs still in the air, and fixing most of them in post-release updates.

        Yeah, I still shudder from the utter mess of Gutsy upgrades from Feisty. Not a single Ubuntu user in the office had a clean upgrade...

    • Re:Freeze just now? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by jd (1658) <imipak&yahoo,com> on Thursday July 24, @10:50PM (#24330017) Homepage Journal

      Just looked through the Debian package list. Looks like there's a lot I'd have expected that isn't there (ATLAS seems to be missing, as are the MUMPS and Fortran 95 programming languages - gfortran's f90 support is considered an old dialect, buggy and inadequate by a number of Fortran sites, and I didn't see Erlang on the list either). There are also a lot of ancient versions. For example, HDF5 1.6.6 has not been supported for some time. HDF 1.6.7 is the supported current version in the 1.6.x branch and has been since February, but the website makes it clear that the 1.8.x branch is intended as the official current release.

      This is something that isn't Debian't fault -- there are way too many packages with way too many updates and far too few people helping -- and is something that all distributins suffer from. The specialist distros may help, but I don't like the concept. Beter to have a single core distro with extensions for specialist needs, as then you can combine extensions according to problem-space rather than dealing with the version hell that always happens when you mix distros.

    • Ubuntu is built off a snapshot of Unstable,
      Not exactly, changes are auto-imported from debian unstable only for packages that don't have any ubuntu specific changes.

      so I don't see how Debian's freeze will affect it.
      Debian tries to keep testing and unstable pretty close to each other. Changes in unstable that are not wanted in testing can be a major PITA when bugs need to be fixed (there is another way into testing but they prefer not to use it because the packages get far less testing when they are introduced by that route).

      So while unstable is not technically frozen developers are strongly discouraged from uploading stuff to unstable that are not intended to become part of lenny

All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2009 SourceForge, Inc.