Debian to keep leader, release etch sooner

Posted Oct 15, 2006 16:33 UTC (Sun) by Richard_J_Neill (subscriber, #23093) [Link]

I think there is a misunderstanding. Etch won't be released before it is *technically* ready. But this political discussion about firmware, while very important, won't directly affect the release. Waiting till/if it is resolved would probably do more harm than good.

Posted Oct 15, 2006 16:34 UTC (Sun) by Thue (subscriber, #14277) [Link]

Well - this is not quite the same. The fact that there is some non-free firmware blobs is not going to make the release work technically worse.

The firmware problem is mainly political rather than technical. Resolving it will probably make Debian work technically worse in the short term, as they will have to remove some firmware.

The "release when ready" philosophy is usually used for technical and not political problems.

Posted Oct 15, 2006 20:25 UTC (Sun) by dark (subscriber, #8483) [Link]

The current release has the same firmware problem, so there would be no real point in delaying etch.

Posted Oct 16, 2006 9:43 UTC (Mon) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

The article do not mention two crucial points of the firmware
resolution:
3. We assure the community that there will be no regressions in the progress made for freedom in the kernel distributed by Debian relative to the Sarge release in Etch
4. ... we will deliver firmware ... as long as we are legally allowed to do so, and the firmware is distributed upstream under a license that complies with the DFSG.

so there is not much conceded to the Etch release.