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.

No "haha" tag?

[Anonymous Coward]

If this article was about Microsoft instead of Debian, you know the tone would be substantially different.

Re:Please, we want Debian 4.1, not 5.0

[Antique Geekmeister]

I am laughing very hard that RHEL tried to say there's no such thing as a '.0' or '.1' release, and it's all 'RHEL 4' or 'RHEL 5'. Take a look at the available media, though, and you'll see that they're really still doing what they did with the old RedHat 6 and RedHat 7: .0 is unstable, .1 has bugfixes, .2 is stable.

Re:Good!

[Firehed]

I thought Linux was supposed to be to OS X as OS X is to Windows in terms of stability (ie, not just rock-solid, but it will punch you in the gut if you try to crash it)... is this not the case?

Re:Good!

[andrikos]

In Ubuntu, the trick I do is to use binary packages of the latest stable version and source packages from the upcoming (yet unreleased) version.
When something is missing you can download the source package of the new version, make the compile, generate a binary package and install it in an automated way.
An extra plus: during the process you can also patch the source.

Re:What else is new?

[Locke2005]

Queue Orson Welles' deep voice stating "We will ship no Linux before it's time". Seriously, I always thought this was one of the major advantages contributing to Linux quality: not having to meet arbitrary release deadlines imposed by marketing and sales. Unlike one of Debian's Operating System competitors that will go unmentioned except to say that they're based in Redmond where the Vista is always cloudy. This isn't news because it is exactly what I would expect Open Source developers to do.

I just have one stupid question: when will Debian run out of Toy Story Characters [wikipedia.org] to name releases after? (Methinks the Hand-in-the-box [wikipedia.org] release will not be well received...)

Re:No "haha" tag?

[Sancho]

Possibly, but I truly don't think Microsoft could ever do right around here. Short of releasing the OS under either the BSD license or the GPL, they will forever have a reputation as software bloaters, monopolists, and DRM-supporters. And such a reputation is not undeserved.

The truth is, I'm not sure they could ever make a stable release of Windows. Vista was horribly delayed, horribly buggy on release, and had dropped a fair number of planned features in order to prevent further delays. If they'd planned to quash most of the bugs before release, I wonder how long it would have taken to get it all done?

Debian has the benefit of a good reputation and of having free software. People aren't scared to run pre-release versions of Debian in production, and it's relatively simple to fix many bugs yourself while waiting for something official from Debian. This means that Debian gets more testers doing real work with their release candidates.

Compare this to Microsoft, who also publish beta and release candidates for free (though free-as-in-beer.) How many people ran Vista full-time before it was released? Heck, Microsoft can barely get people to run it full-time now that it's been out for a while!

Re:What else is new?

[ShieldW0lf]

Ubuntu Hardy is easier for search engines to find than Ubuntu 8.04

Which makes it easier to find references to what you're looking for.