Debian Decides To Adopt Time-Based Release Freezes

frenchbedroom writes "The ongoing Debconf 9 meeting in Cáceres, Spain has brought a significant change to Debian's project management. The Debian project will now freeze development in December of every odd year, which means we can expect a new Debian release in the spring of every even year, starting with 'Squeeze' in 2010. Until now, development freezing was decided by the Debian release team. From the announcement: 'The project chose December as a suitable freeze date since spring releases proved successful for the releases of Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (codenamed "Etch") and Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 ("Lenny"). Time-based freezes will allow the Debian Project to blend the predictability of time based releases with its well established policy of feature based releases. The new freeze policy will provide better predictability of releases for users of the Debian distribution, and also allow Debian developers to do better long-term planning. A two-year release cycle will give more time for disruptive changes, reducing inconveniences caused for users. Having predictable freezes should also reduce overall freeze time.' We previously discussed talks between Canonical and the Debian release team about fixed freeze dates."

Re:I like this

[lordandmaker]

Er, ish.

Debian Stable is the closest Debian has to an equivalent of Ubuntu's LTS release. Debian Testing's about a Ubuntu 'normal'.

But the two distros work in different ways, the comparison's not that cut-and-dried, since LTS releases are just normal releases with long support times.

Debian Stable is unchanging in featureset for its lifetime, Debian Testing is the testing for the next Stable, and Debian Unstable is where the changes to be tested are made.

As I understand it, Ubuntu 'freezes' a mirror of Debian testing, prettifies it, and releases it as Ubuntu. This is grossly under-representing Ubuntu's contribution, but is sort-of accurate in principle

Re:I like this

[Nursie]

Well, I likewise don't see why you would go for an ubuntu server over a debian one :)

Ubuntu has a six monthly release cycle with yearly LTS IIRC?

Debian is effectively always LTS, when it's released. When you release every two years and provide patches and updates for the oldstable as well as the stable branch you effectively have a 4 year support cycle anyway.

Also, Ubuntu is *so* x86 and whilst I know this is changing slowly I have three headless ARM based servers running debian right now. Err...
For me, Ubuntu didn't get on very well with my laptop and debian does. YMMV, obviously, and we've strayed out of serverland now. I know Ubuntu has advantages, but debian is my distro of choice.

Re:By the Way - this insane versioning bent

[lordandmaker]

But sit down at a random machine and try work out WHAT release of Debian (or Fedora or whatever) you are actually sitting in front of and you can pull your hair out.

cat /etc/issue
cat /etc/apt/sources.list
cat /etc/lsb_release

Often works. It's by no means ubiquitous, I'm well aware, but it's rarely *that* difficult.

Re:By the Way - this insane versioning bent

[PieSquared]

Ubuntu does reasonably well with this. They get the catchy name *and* obvious order by coming up with names associated with a letter, in alphabetical order. Jaunty is more recent then Feisty because "J" comes after "F".

And then they also stick the month and year on as the version number, which I thought was a good idea. 9.04 Jaunty is more recent then 7.04 Feisty because "J" comes after "F" and "April 2009" comes after "April 2007".

And finally you get an "about" page that lists both the name and the number.

Re:By the Way - this insane versioning bent

[Anonymous Coward]

For Debian based systems:
 
cat /etc/debian_version

Re:By the Way - this insane versioning bent

[arjennienhuis]

lsb_release -a