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Debian

Debian May 1 Release Delayed 226

Posted by CmdrTaco from the who's-surprised-by-that dept.
andrew writes "Anthony Towns, Debian's Release Manager, posted this message regarding the status of the expected May 1st release of Woody made reference to in this slashdot story. In short, he says: "So, it's April 30th (for most of the planet, anyway), which probably means folks are beginning to get mildly curious about whether woody'll actually be ready for release tomorrow. The answer is a definite 'kind-of'. Which is to say, 'no'.""
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Debian May 1 Release Delayed More

Debian May 1 Release Delayed

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  • Huh? (Score:5, Funny)

    by proverbialcow ( 177020 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @08:53AM (#3434897) Journal
    How do you delay May 1st?

    • Re:Huh? (Score:4, Funny)

      by Latent IT ( 121513 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @09:06AM (#3434940)
      The great quote from the article:

      Hopefully people will be able to use the forthcoming suffering as an incentive to get this done right next time.

      Now that's the hellfire and damnation management theory I subscribe to! =)
      • "use the forthcoming suffering as an incentive" - and all that remains now is for the e-mail addresses of the people responsible to be posted on /.!
    • How do you delay May 1st?

      Easy. You reset your system clock to 1st Jan 1900...

      Cheers,
      Ian

  • So Woody is going to become the new Stable, is that correct?

  • I have to say, I'm proud of them. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Latent IT ( 121513 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @09:04AM (#3434934)
    Delay of a release date is always a terrible thing, especially for the poor release manager, who, in this case, sounds like things got a little out of his control. Perhaps it's the peril of working on free software, and having volunteers instead of cubicle drones.

    Of course, the delay will net the Linux community something positive - a better Debian. Well, maybe not for the l33t d00ds out there who can take charge, and manually bonk around and get all their own security updates... but for the sysadmins, and the desktop supporting IT people.

    What I'm wondering is why games are often the most delayed. If anything, a patch to a game won't be the most terrible thing you could do. But Neverwinter Nights, Duke Nukem Forever, oh, and that steaming John Romero pile... Every Blizzard game ever made! Hmmmm. Maybe they don't want us to have so much fun too fast. ;p

  • too many release-critical bugs.... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @09:07AM (#3434949)
    Currently there are 47 release-critical bugs;
    woody will presumably released when these bugs
    are closed... so help debuging !
    • Murphy's Law #46 Each computer code has five bugs, and this number does not depend on how many bugs have been already found (it is conservative). and #36 Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
    • A good number of those release-critical bugs are problems building the packages on the lesser used platforms. I'd love to resolve the IA64 problems myself, but I just dont have the hardware.

      Removing some of these packages from only the affected ports could significantly reduce the number of release-critical bugs.

  • Let the flaming begin (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I'm expecting to see a lot of 'Debian sucks, it's out of date before it's even released', but I think this is a good thing. Releasing a distribution before it's ready can be disasterous (RedHat's gcc 2.96 anyone?)... I'd rather have a working, secure, stable distribution a few days later than have a highly experimental one with all sorts of hidden defects right now.
    • thats very optimystical of you, only a few days.
      I have been waiting for this one for quite some months (maybe unrealisticaly)

      and yes I meant to spell it "optimystical"

    • experimental? (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I'd rather have a working, secure, stable distribution a few days later than have a highly experimental one with all sorts of hidden defects right now.

      Sounds like Linux isn't the system for you. Try FreeBSD [freebsd.org]

  • No problem (Score:5, Insightful)

    by realnowhereman ( 263389 ) <andyparkins@nOsPam.gmail.com> on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @09:08AM (#3434951)
    I never really expected woody to go on May the 1st but still am obviously disappointed. However, getting over my own selfish wish to have new toys to play with - this demonstrates why debian is good. The guys preparing it have to deal with the same problems every other distributor deals with, except they seem to be obsessive about not releasing shoddy work just to meet a deadline. Given the enormous pressure to release they must be under from the community I reckon that takes guts and they should all be commended for it. (Doesn't stop me being desperate for woody though does it? :-))
  • In my experience with computer software, and especially operating systems, I've never seen a single piece of software being released on its announced release day.

    Why? Is it that project management and programming skills are two incompatible skills for a human brain? Is it that everyone try to hype their project by making people wait a little longer? Is it that `cal' has an undiscovered bug? Is the world made this way to please som obscure and annoying god?

    I guess it's a mix.


    • I don't agree with that, the Millenium Bug went off at the right time on a few systems, did prove unreliable as it was expected to work elsewhere too, but they did get it out (well done guys).

      Those timestamped virii seem to do pretty well, announcement goes out before hand and it does work for some people, of course for others it gets broken by another piece of software that just seems designed to break it (which doesn't seem very good software practice to me).

      And of course Unix, which is delivered EVERYTIME you install it as Jan 1 1970, which is very impressive, that means you install it BEFORE you need it, even if you decide to install it after you need it!

    • Man has been building homes and temples for millennia, yet budgeting and estimation for these projects remains nowhere near an exact science. Hardly any project can come in on time and within the budget -- that's just the nature of business. I'm continually amazed at how people in our field seem to think that this "phenomenon" is unique to software development.

      On the other hand, Debian and Mozilla are two projects that are always notoriously late.
    • My experience has been the opposite. Every piece of software I've been involved with was on-time and under budget. No it's not about me, rather I've worked with some exceptional programmers and some really down-to-earth managers.

      Of course, a couple of projects got cancelled partway through, and sometimes the feature-list for the release got pared to match time-remaining. Still good planning can pay off.
    • Is it that project management and programming skills are two incompatible skills for the human brain?
      I can only tell my experiences (no! not from the management :). I'm not that a coder either, but I'm most productive, when I go into the famous "deep hack" mode, concentrating on a problem, and then I don't have any sense of time. That's one part. The second part is that it's quite difficult to get into this mode, so I'm not that productive at all.. :) It's a tough decision. Keep my sense of time, and don't code, or code, but without respect to deadlines :)

      • Is it that project management and programming skills are two incompatible skills for the human brain?

        I can only tell my experiences (no! not from the management :). I'm not that a coder either, but I'm most productive, when I go into the famous "deep hack" mode, concentrating on a problem, and then I don't have any sense of time.

        I'd have to agree... I know that "deep hack" mode as well sometimes. In it, time seems to become irrelevant. Sometimes, it'll take me a week to finish a particular problem at work. Other times, I chew through the available work, finishing what would normally take a month in two days. Unfortunately, the environment I'm in tends to push me into the slow deep hack more than the fast deep hack. :( Managers can influence the programmers' mental states, but typically are clueless enough that they end up doing more harm than good.

        Personally, the best way to put my mind in a fast deep hack is a quiet work environment with cool, slightly humid air, lots of natural colored light, and a feeling like I'm slightly isolated but able to interact with my coworkers. Poorly working, loud air conditioner units are bad. Flourescent lights are bad. A quarter of the flourescent light bulbs are worse. Cubes with only two walls are bad. Cubes with a second worker are worse. More than that and you've ruined the entire point of hiring more people. Don't bother putting a worker at an open desk against the wall when you run out of space. You'll get more bang for your buck by not spending it. Cubes with four walls, even if one is a half height wall where the entry opening is are better. The size of the cube is less relevant as long as its well lit, ventilated, and quiet.

        And on a related note, snacks and drinks are good, too. Personally, I'd love to see free snacks and drinks available in the breakroom. (oh, yeah, having a breakroom's good too... it should be very well lit and ventilated and have non-tinted windows to the outside world) I know free snacks and drinks can be a problem, since it can get abused too easily, but what about a system which accounts for who got what? Maybe take that magstripe on the back of my id badge and allow me to swipe for free cokes & snacks. That way, if someone's taking an inordinately high amount of cokes, you can talk to them (or sign them up for coca-cola's anonymous).

        Anyway, enough soapbox for now.

  • blame game? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mydigitalself ( 472203 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @09:14AM (#3434977)
    reading the tone of aj's message, he seems to be blaming various members indirectly for the delay. surely if he is the "woody release manager", he:

    a) wouldn't have let these issues which have been known for months only crop up now.
    b) should have known earlier than the day before to announce the delay.

    so if you consider the delay of woody to be a failure, i wouldn't blame the anonymous (yet cited) individuals who checked in code late. i would blame the process that resulted in these events.
  • Woody will not include KDE 3. I don't mind them not having KDE 3 in May 2002, but that means they won't have KDE 3 in May 2003 either!

    • Re:KDE3 (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Ray Dassen ( 3291 )
      I don't mind them not having KDE 3 in May 2002, but that means they won't have KDE 3 in May 2003 either!

      I wouldn't be so sure of that. You could run testing rather than stable, for one thing. Also we've made significant improvements in the project's infrastructure (the stable/testing/unstable split with mostly automated propagation from unstable to testing; good autobuilders) which significantly increase the chances of "woody+1" being released within a much shorter timeframe than potato->woody (which also was lengthened by the legal and technical resolution of crypto-in-main).

      • Re:KDE3 (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Cro Magnon ( 467622 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @10:14AM (#3435310) Homepage Journal
        The problem is, many people HAVE to run testing because stable is too old. It's not a serious issue on my home PC, but I can imagine trying to get my boss to switch to Debian and telling him he has to use a "testing" distro because we need a web browser newer than mozilla M18. Or, worse, having to go to "unstable" because some security update didn't get into testing. If, in fact woody+1 is released faster, that will help a lot. Stable would still be old, but much more useable.
        • Well, your boss has to make a choice. He can have software that is old but extremely stable, or software that is modern but less stable. It is in the nature of software enginering that stability improves over time and with patches.

          At least Debian gives him this choice. Install a shiny new RedHat if you prefer; just don't complain that it is not as solid as Debian Stable.

      • Re:KDE3 (Score:2, Informative)

        by sewagemaster ( 466124 )
        experimental packages for debian and a short howto:
        i'm using it right now actually. not the most stable thing in the world, but it's alright.

        http://kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=146 4
  • Really, it's only the people using ISO's that even care. And they don't even need it. It's easy enough to install a base minimum system using the current release, then change one line in your sources file, run apt-get dist-upgrade, and magically you're using Woody. I'd venture to say that most people currently running Debian did this exact thing. And those very people won't gain much, if anything, from an official release.

    So who exactly are the great hordes who are out there demanding that this new, wonderful product be released? Do they even exist?
    • For a home user, I agree. I did a dist-upgrade on one of my machines, the other I just downloaded the rescue, root and driver floppies and just installed woody over the network (love my cable modem!). Doing a dist-upgrade over a per-minute dialup could be tough. Then again, can't you get a woody snapshot from cheapbytes [cheapbytes.com] or something? Yeah, I just don't see hordes of ppl waiting for CDs to become available when woody releases.

      For production, it is probably a bigger deal. I would imagine there are shops that keep close tabs on what version is running and may allow only 'stable'. There are no doubt SAs out there that have a test box or two running woody waiting for the day it goes to stable so they can start upgrading the production machines.

  • Woody is already great, will be even better (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dilute ( 74234 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @09:31AM (#3435051)
    For most purposes, Woody has been pretty stable for months. All this new date means is that "Woody" becomes the officially released "Stable" Debian distribution.

    Debian is a little behind because they insist that all software be packaged and configured in a consistent way. It makes for a more stable and upgradeable system.

    Debian has high quality standards, which contributes to these kinds of delays.

    Trading off a few weeks of bleeding edge currency for stability seems well worth it to me.
  • Taco posts this in the "who's suprised by that department", yet let's all start the timer until the next time that one of the /. editors makes some sarcastic comment about .NET being delayed...
  • Come on, people. Just add testing to your apt-sources and upgrade already. The damn thing is much more stable than any other Linux distro at this point, and KDE1 and a 1.0 Kernel must be getting old by now.

    I'm not ragging on Debian, it's just that Woody has been stable enough for production machines for a long damn time. That's a Good Thing(tm).

    sm

  • kudos (Score:2)

    by Tom ( 822 )
    This is good news. I've been a Debian fan for a while, but being able to point to this posting as a proof of just how serious they take security (serious enough to delay a release) will make it much easier for me to push Debian in my work environment.

  • filth (Score:5, Funny)

    by tps12 ( 105590 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @09:42AM (#3435096) Homepage Journal
    The last thing I want to read about is debate over when it's time to "release the woody." That is just nasty, and there is no place for such filth on the Internet.
  • There have been several pieces of software which have been relased and then patched within weeks of the release... infact, wasnt XP one of those products?

    As long as the delay is reasonable, and there are good reasons to delay (which I'm sure there are) then dont complain!

    debian are doing us all a favour by not releasing something their note sure of quite yet
  • so i'm going around, wherever possible, and promoting debian as THE standard linux distibution. bye-bye red hat, au revoir mandrake, auf wiedersehen suse, adios connectiva, and so on. all of these distribution companies should stop trying to sell linux itself, and instead sell supporting content like applications, books, support services, etc. in turn they would then contibute to a single standard linux distribution, i.e. debian. why? because if they all did, hardware and software vendors would rally behind liux having a single install base to support, administrators could be confident in deployment of linux on the company desktop, and end-users would no longer be swimming in sea of distribution confusion, and then in about 2 seconds flat the microsoft tyranny would finally fall. it is really just that simple: united we stand, divied we fall. viva la debian!!!
    • I love debian as much as the next person who runs Sid, but I know people who love suse/redhat/slackware/etc. And each of them would say why should we get behind debian? They would make the arguement that they should get behind their favorite distro simply because it is their favorite one. Redhat has been working on vendor support, so why not them?

      Don't get me wrong I think a unified standard should happen, but it probably will not happen any time soon.

      Not to mention there always seems to be 2 rather large camps on each side of an issue in the OSS world. KDE/Gnome Emacs/VI, foo/bar you get my point. This one seems to be RPM/apt-get, I say that because that is the real reason people select debian or an RPM based distro, I know they aren't the same thing, but it's the idea that either "hunt down what you want in RPM form" or "apt-get any package you want"

      Their will not be any kind of standard as long as the A/B exist (which will more then likely be a very long time). Actualy I am wrong, the only kind of standards that can exist are the standard Flame Wars because of it.
      • Please, stop comparing RPMS to apt-get. Compare rpm to dpkg all you want, but apt-get is completely different. If you want apt-get functionality on Red Hat use up2date, if you want it on Mandrake use urpmi. These tools have existed in their respective distributions for several releases now and work just as well as apt-get.

  • Woody is practically stable now. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Daniel ( 1678 ) <dburrows@deb i a n.org> on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @10:16AM (#3435324)
    NOTE: THIS IS MY PERSONAL INTERPRETATION OF EVENTS AND NOT AN OFFICIAL STATEMENT ON BEHALF OF DEBIAN!

    For people who didn't read or failed to comprehend Anthony's message, here are the relevant parts:


    On the upside, woody itself is ready to be released. The only outstanding
    changes that need to be made are the standard security fixes that need
    to be made throughout the lifetime of stable anyway.

    Unfortunately, that's exactly where we've dropped the ball: the security
    team presently don't have the resources to handle security advisories
    for woody.

    ...

    the final automatic run of the testing scripts was today, and will
    be reflected in the next mirror pulse. From this point, we'll have
    manually approved security updates to some packages, and very little
    else, until release.

    This translates to the following: woody is now being treated as if it were a stable release. The only thing that it doesn't have at the moment is support from the security team.

    The reason it is not being released as stable is that it is significantly harder for the security team to support than potato (due to almost-doubling the number of architectures), and "over the next week or so", technical solutions to this problem will be implemented. If you can live without this for a while (I don't know how long this will take to resolve, but it sounds like a few weeks is an upper bound), you can install woody now. Otherwise, you might want to wait a bit.

    Daniel

  • I love debian, but.. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by astyanax ( 8365 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @10:24AM (#3435381) Homepage
    some of the speed issues are rather maddening. Consider: I work very closely with the debian maintainer for [debian.org]
    nano, in fact I'd say we are friends. He has done his best to get a particular nasty issue [debian.org], in fact the problem was annoying enough that it required a fix upstream (on my end). But even though two official releases have gone by since the fix was put in upstream, it may not in fact end up in the first release of woody, four months later. I have used debian for probably 5 years now, but I have to wonder if source distros like gentoo [gentoo.org] have the right idea about making the user decide how to compile his or her package which severely cuts down the burden on the package maintainers. I guess it all comes back to how to balance the burden of upstream/package maintainer/end user...

  • delayed, fine, for the wrong reasons, no (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Quietti ( 257725 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @10:37AM (#3435465) Journal

    I honnestly don't mind it if Woody is a few weeks late from the ETA, especially if it's about making the build more consistant between all architectures and to ensure the security patches will be uploaded in a timely manner.

    What I do mind is Woody being delayed, only a few weeks from when packages like KDE 3.0 and Gnome 2.0 would become stable enough for inclusion. Meanwhile, at the moment, Galeon and Mozilla don't build cleanly on all platforms, not to mention XFree86 4.2 ...yes, Branden explained that he must first smooth the process for all architectures and I agree with him, however...

    What makes Debian support by makers of non-free packages so absent is because Debian stable distros are always 2 years behind everybody else, in terms of what version of glibc, XFree or kernel the stable distro is installing with. There are two solutions I can think of for that:

    1. Release every 6 months, no matter what, like OpenBSD does. If a package doesn't make it to stable this time, the next possible slot is only 6 months away, not 2 years.
    2. Allow upgrades to existing packages - or completely new packages - to be released within the release's lifespan, if they are built on existing libs available in this release e.g. if someone manages to get Evolution or Galeon to build reliably for all 11 architectures, using the libs released for Woody, then include it in Woody r1, r2, etc. in 6 months from now.

    Otherwise, if we're gonna wait a few more weeks, we might as well give KDE 3.0 and Gnome 2.0 (not to mention XFree 4.2) enough time to slide from unstable to testing and be included with Woody. Nobody that needs Linux in a production environment can afford to wait 2 years for those to be released, at a time when they are just upgrading to Woody from their already much deprecated Potato. When it comes to that, the solution will be to crossgrade to Suse or Red Hat, if a desired package is not available the day Woody makes it to stable and becomes a priority upgrade on everyone's TO-DO list; Debian will be no more in yet a few production environments, if it looks like it's gonna be obsolete at birth again, the same way Potato was.

    As for those who feel like saying Blah! Just point your APT sources to unstable, you'll always have the latest!, don't.

    While testing is almost sufficiently stable for a production environment, it is a constantly moving target that would need to be upgraded every couple of days; this is simply impractical for a production environment, nobody has that much spare time on their hands at work.

    Then unstable is, as its name implies, unstable; I've often had computers become partially incapacitated for a few days, because some new package was uploaded without its updated dependencies, making APT stop the upgrade process right after unpacking a few packages.

    The solution to the perpetual Debian release lag is simple: release always, release often. Allowing new packages based upon existing libc or xlib to be released within the lifespan of a distro - not just bugfixes and security patches - is a must, at the very least.

    • Otherwise, if we're gonna wait a few more weeks, we might as well give KDE 3.0 and Gnome 2.0 (not to mention XFree 4.2) enough time to slide from unstable to testing and be included with Woody.

      That way lies madness: those are your pet projects, but someone else might want a new version of Apache or gcc, or the new debian-installer system, or...

      There's always going to be something that's "almost ready" to be in the next release. The solution is to make the next release happen faster, not to introduce an indefinite number of incremental delays.

      Daniel
    • When Potato became the stable distribution, everyone said that they should have waited just a tiny bit longer, because Linus was supposed to release the new 2.4 kernel any day now. It turned out that the 2.4 kernel was delayed, and if Potato had waited for it, it would have been far too long.

      There are thousands of packages in Debian. If any single package upgrade is not ready for the release, it's not fair to the other packages and their maintainers to make them wait. If you want to have more up to date stuff on your system, then when Woody becomes stable, don't change your /etc/apt/sources.conf file to read stable. Leave it at testing, and you'll get the new KDE and Gnome very soon.

    • Re:delayed, fine, for the wrong reasons, no (Score:4, Insightful)

      by CoughDropAddict ( 40792 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @01:34PM (#3436797) Homepage
      What I do mind is Woody being delayed, only a few weeks from when packages like KDE 3.0 and Gnome 2.0 would become stable enough for inclusion.

      Just because the software is stable enough for inclusion doesn't mean it's ready to be released with the rest of Debian.

      For example, a stable version of the Apache 2.0 series was released several weeks ago, but it's not going to be included in woody. Compliance with Debian policy and integration with the rest of the Debian system take time to get right. In the case of Apache 2.0, I believe there are changes to policy regarding virtual hosts that are necessary before it can be included.

      While testing is almost sufficiently stable for a production environment, it is a constantly moving target that would need to be upgraded every couple of days; this is simply impractical for a production environment, nobody has that much spare time on their hands at work.

      Just because testing is always being updated doesn't mean you have to follow it every couple of days! If you're happy with what you have, then keep on using it. If you need a new version of a package, then just pull the package that you need. There's absolutely zero need to upgrade if you don't want to.

      If you want consistancy across a group of machines, then pick a day and declare that day's version of testing to be your locally stable version of the distribution.
    • I heartily (if respectfully :-) disagree. Debian's release schedule strikes me as saner than any other distribution's, which is why I use it. There are four salient stability heights to fly at:
      1. Old as rocks, and just as stable. This is for servers; proftpd doesn't change that much from year to year. This is Debian stable.
      2. Old enough to be behind the cutting edge, but not yet old enough to be totally trustworthy. This is where most distributions fly (remember when kernel 2.4 came out?) Redhat makes it work pretty well by QAing holy hell out of their software at this stage, stablizing it before its time, but it costs them a lot to do this.
      3. "It worked for a week. Ship." This is Debian testing.
      4. "I want it to break so I can fix it." This is unstable, Cooker, Rawhide, etc.
      The lack of #1 and #3 is what turns me off about all the commercial distros I've tried. If you value recent software above rock-solid stability, run testing; in my experience it's plenty stable enough for everyday use.
      While testing is almost sufficiently stable for a production environment, it is a constantly moving target that would need to be upgraded every couple of days; this is simply impractical for a production environment, nobody has that much spare time on their hands at work.
      Eh? No. Point yourself at testing, "apt-get upgrade" once, and forget about it until the next time you want newer software. Nobody says you have to track the upgrades.
      Also, it's important to remember that version numbers aren't the whole story. Once I wound up with a video card that needed X from CVS -- 4.2 didn't have it yet. I had already checked out the CVS tree (big!) when I discovered that Debian's "4.1" build of X had had the driver backported. I've yet to have a problem with that driver.

    • Whenever a new release of Debian approaches, there are always people wanting it sooner and people wanting it later (so the very latest version of their favorite package can be included). Because Debian is released so infrequently, people fear they will be stuck with old software. As suggested, if Debian released every six months, like clockwork (and FreeBSD), then both parties would be satisified. There is always a new version just a few months away, so there is no need to worry if your favorite package didn't make it in this release. If Debian does not drop its "cathedral" developlment approach for shorter incremental developmenet.. well, we'll see ya'll in 2004 when a Debian stable released finally includes KDE 3.0, Gnome 2.0, and Mozilla 1.0.

  • Read the message. (Score:3, Informative)

    by shippo ( 166521 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @10:46AM (#3435525)
    Read the message from Anthony Towns. The only real problem is getting a mechanism in place to automatically build security updates for the 11 architectures supported by woody when the need arises. The architectures currently in potato are not a problem, just the additional 5 added since. The release will be delayed until this mechanism is in place.

    This is a very sensible decision, and should be applauded.
  • I was hoping to celebrate two things on that day. Now I can only look forward to cheering the first year with my beloved. Life is so cruel! Damn you Debian for letting me down! *sobbing*

    j/k

  • This is really good to hear (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    From the article:

    ... the security team presently don't have the resources to handle security advisories for woody ... Naturally, we will not be making the woody release until we have a viable mechanism for making timely security updates.

    This strikes me as really good news. Here is an outfit which takes my security seriously. This gives me a lot more confidence that I can rely on them to keep my machine running with no hassles to me. I have my apt-get sources file pointed at the stable distribution, and that description is going to continue to be accurate.

    Thanks, Debian maintainers!

  • this will result in worldwide protests.
    police will have a hard time, calming down the debian-users.

    join the revolution [debian.com]
    • In most of the world, May 1 is Labor Day already, so there will already be world-wide protests. (For you Yankees, Labor Day outside the US is a day for Trade Unionists and Marxists and such to go out and march in parades and hold one-day general strikes. For you non-Yankees, Labor Day in the US is the day for end-of-summer picnics, cooking food on the barbeque, going to the beach, or alternatively deciding whether to go to Burning Man or Worldcon.)


      So if the product's late, obviously the team is just on strike....

  • but 'woody'll' is not even remotely proper. You can't make it into a contraction. 'woddy will' would be the correct way to say it.
  • Led Zeppelin's "Physical Graffiti," a double LP that is deffinatley one of the best works of the band, was delayed something like 8 weeks for the cover. That most have sucked for the Zepp fans in 1975.
    Here's the catch: It had the most expensive cover ever made to that date. And it was soo damn cool (an apartment building that had pieces of paper with differnt pictures in the windows of the building that you could slide around to change. On the front AND back)
    I don't know if that's a good analogy, but... hey, anything for a good time!
  • Why can't they speed things up a little by moving unstable to testing at the same time as they move testing to stable? ie -- there would always be the following three distros:

    stable -- current stable release
    testing -- almost feature-complete next release
    unstable -- new features get added here

    Then, as soon as testing is declared stable, unstable moves to testing, and a new unstable is created...

    Maybe that would make things a little faster, as it's basically biting off less at a time... unless of course, they already do that...

    rr

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