our biggest handicap is that we're always a year behind everyone else. being a year behind is suicide in any industry. being a year behind in an industry that moves as fast as open source software, is idiocy. our stable release is using 2.0.36. most people are afraid of our 'unstable' tree. you've seen all the threads about people trying to upgrade from slink to potato and having all sorts of problems. why do they do it? because slink is so far behind that it isn't usefull anymore.
IMHO, leaving out 2.4 is a bad idea. there were problems with 2.0 -> 2.2. there was an incompatible build of lsof, as well as some networking problems. i feel the same way about xf86 4.0 and apache 2.0. all of these releases are going to generate a lot of press, not to mention the fact that these are very usefull products. yeah, it will be a lot of work. building a good distribution *is* a lot of work. this thread brings up an interesting topic: how can we keep up? the debian project is huge. no one is going to contest that it could be difficult to pump out a stable release of this size every 3 months. or any interval for that matter. but something really does have to be done, or debian will fall into laughability. i think i have the beginning of a good idea. please flame/comment as you see fit. make a release every 3 months with an official cd image, fanfair on the website, the whole shebang. only include enough on the cd to do a basic install. only consider 'release critical' bugs release critical if they're against required base pacakges. the rest of the distribution would remain on the archive sites. with this pattern, we produce four releases per year. three interim releases (2.3, 2.4, 2.5) and one major release (3.0). in order to figure out what packages to include on the interim release, we probably should get statistics on what most people use. perhaps analize logs from the archive sites, and encourage more people to use popularity-contest.deb. what do you folks think? Ben Collins ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: > On Sat, Mar 11, 2000 at 01:57:49PM -0500, SCOTT FENTON wrote: > > OK, Linus has just put out 2.3.51, the next patch will be a pre-2.4 one. > > To avoid the problems we've had with slink not being 2.2, I reccomend > > that, even if it's not the default, we include a 2.4 /binary/ in potato. > > You could even put a note in the potato release notes saying you don't > > reccomend putting it on, but please /please/ PLEASE put potato out with > > a 2.4, or even pre-2.4 binary. > > What problems have we have with slink not being 2.2? I don't see any. In > fact, I protest profusely, since 2.4 will require a great deal of work to > work out the pcmcia kinks. There is nothing wrong with 2.2. What I want is > 2.2.15 in potato, nothing more. > > -- > -----------=======-=-======-=========-----------=====------------=-=------ > / Ben Collins -- ...on that fantastic voyage... -- Debian GNU/Linux \ > ` [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] ' > `---=========------=======-------------=-=-----=-===-======-------=--=---' > > > -- > To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] > -- (jacob kuntz) [EMAIL PROTECTED],underworld}.net [EMAIL PROTECTED] (megabite systems) "think free speech, not free beer." (gnu foundataion)