Bugs Delay Release of Debian Lenny

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.

What else is new?

[martinw89]

Shocking!!!

Seriously, this doesn't seem unusual. I'm happy that the team is waiting until all the bugs are squashed.

Good!

[bjourne]

This is good news. There are many distributions that just take the latest and greatest of every package without doing proper quality control (Ubuntu, Gentoo, Fedora, etc). The price they pay is regressions and stuff that doesn't work. There needs to be distros like Debian which, while always delayed, has all the important bugs ironed out.

Re:Good!

[Meshach]

Obviously you have never worked in software QA. There are always bugs that make it into released project. The art of good project management is deciding which bugs can be allowed into the final project (ie which will actually impact users).

Also I am pretty sure that Ubuntu is based on Debian.

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously you suck at reading comprehension.

There needs to be distros like Debian which, while always delayed, has all the important bugs ironed out.

Re:Good!

[Hatta]

Exactly. And if you're too impatient to wait for them to get all the bugs out, that's what Sid is for. I've been using debian unstable since it was lenny, and it's always been very good. It's very rare that there's actually a bug in a package I use, so it's plenty stable for my purposes.

Re:No "haha" tag?

[martinw89]

Actually, I think we would be glad if Microsoft was holding back a release because of critical bugs. Sure, there would be the occasional jackhole who said Microsoft sucks because they can't keep a release date. But, if they were being as open as Debian and admitting to fixing critical bugs (and presenting them for us to see), I'm sure there would be some insightful comments about the increased quality being worth the wait.

Re:Who still uses Debian?

[clang_jangle]

Who? Only a few thousand sysadmins, researchers, and other conscientious geeks. There's so much more going on in the real world than you'll hear about in the media...

Re:Debian has no release date!!!

[RAMMS+EIN]

While I don't dispute the claims you make, I would like to point out that

1. Debian does make announcements about prospective release dates. These aren't firm promises and shouldn't be interpreted as such, but it is disappointing when they miss those dates by months.

2. Releases aren't only made when the bug count drops to zero. First of all, there are bugs that aren't considered "release-critical". Secondly, sometimes (I think this happened with etch) releases are made with known issues and a promise to fix those issues Real Soon Now. Thirdly, the way the bug count is brought to zero usually includes simply throwing out packages that have known bugs. If many people want such a package, that isn't very helpful.

3. Bugs that would have been "release-critical" are often discovered after a release is made. The current stable release, etch, had more release-critical bugs pending against it than lenny (the upcoming stable release), last time I checked.

What all this means is that Debian will _not_ generalyl be released at any date that has been mentioned, and will _not_ generally be bug-free when released.

Having said all that, it's still my favorite operating system, as it takes less of my time to use and maintain than anything else I have tried (and that is quite a lot).

Re:Good!

[Hognoxious]

How you feel about the advantages and disadvantages of that choice is of course a matter of taste.

It's nice to be able to make that choice.

Re:Debian has no release date!!!

[dedazo]

Some of those bugs are trivial (some are even documentation-related), so I doubt they are *all* blocking at this point.

Re:Good!

[hakr89]

There needs to be distros like Debian which, while always delayed, has all the important bugs ironed out.

..cough..OpenSSL vulnerability [slashdot.org]..cough

Re:What else is new?

[elashish14]

Let's be fair to the Debian devs. They have to maintain more packages and any other distro, plus they have to make sure that it's stable on NINE distros. Plus their level of stability is unparalleled (sentence fragment). You can't blame them for taking a long time, I can't think of any distribution that comes close to what they do (run-on sentence).