Debian Maintainer Hints At September Release for Lenny

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 ..."

Re:Obligatory "does it matter?"

[jchawk]

It matters in the sense that it's a way for Debian to release a new installer or move to a new standard for device management, but as a whole it doesn't *really* matter. If you are using "stable" in your sources.list verses the actually release name you'll in all likelihood just upgrade right along to the new release, and probably without much fuss.

I'm excited either way because I 3 Debian!

Re:Obligatory "does it matter?"

[AmonEzhno]

I agree that the release idea is a little outdated (especially being a freebsd user myself), however it is nice especially with desktop distributions to get new releases. I gather from your post that you seem to have a pretty good grasp of linux so it is not as much an issue for you or me, but more for the common(?) user. For example in ubuntu most releases indicate a significant change in feature set or update in packages. Most home users are not running unstable, so in all likelihood most users are not going to see the latest and greatest in features (unless they have some distinct need and compile from source); the point being that it is a cause for excitement and something to look forward to, at least in my experience.

On a side note: congrats to you for using Debian unstable, I have had poor luck in the past :P

Re:Obligatory "does it matter?"

[Nimey]

I used to use Unstable years back, but thought better of it when a nasty lilo bug rendered my hard drive non-bootable. This would have been in the period between 2.2 and 3.0.

After that I switched to Testing.

Re:Obligatory "does it matter?"

[Bob54321]

I have to say the man has a point here. Rolling releases can be quite stable but every so often something will break and require you have a bit of knowledge about your system to fix it. Personally, I use Arch Linux and really enjoy using it, but I recommend other "stable" distros to people who want their computer to just work.

Will they keep the bug count artificially low?

[SuperBanana]

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.

Re:Will they keep the bug count artificially low?

[SuperBanana]

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:Obligatory "does it matter?"

[yomegaman]

The problem with 'testing' is that it doesn't get security updates in a timely way. You have to do some gyrations to get the package out of unstable just that one time or else wait two weeks. That's how it was a few months ago anyway.

Re:Obligatory "does it matter?"

[zsau]

As for me, of the machines I manage (my own and others in my family), the machines that cause the least troubles and have the happiest users are the ones running Debian Stable. I typically put Debian/testing (by codename) onto new computes as I acquire them, and once testing's become stable, I change them to stable. When I get a new computer, the old one goes to whoever wants it most.

The changes that happen to testing often bring nice new features with awful icky bugs that I don't really want to deal with, and change much too often to be bothered sorting things out. Stable is absolutely the way to go for home users who have someone who can manage their computer (but wouldn't manage it themselves, no matter what operating it runs), and indeed for anyone but people who want to spend too much time working with their computer instead of on their computer. The only problem is if you buy a new computer after the release it'll never support all your hardware...

In that spirit, I am excellently pleased a new Stable release will be coming up—and right on time too, because from about October I'll have much less free time to manage my computer.