Debian Lenny frozen [LWN.net]

Debian Lenny frozen

Posted Jul 28, 2008 17:36 UTC (Mon) by ametlwn (subscriber, #10544)
In reply to: Debian Lenny frozen by pphaneuf
Parent article: Debian Lenny frozen

You cannot have "constantly changing" and "stable" in one Debian release.

For selective packages there is volatile and backports.org, if you always need newest latest
testing might help you.

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Debian Lenny frozen

Posted Jul 28, 2008 20:49 UTC (Mon) by pphaneuf (subscriber, #23480) [Link]

Its not necessarily that I need the very latest at any given time, for that purpose, I suppose you're best off if you bite the bullet and go with unstable. But if a major package is about to get a big update, having the release candidates in testing (so that it's not a big change when it gets finalized) and waiting a little bit would make some sense.

I think this wouldn't be so bad if the average time between stable releases wasn't in the multiple years. I don't know if Firefox 3 made it in time (I hope it did), but it'd be pretty ridiculous to be stuck with Firefox 2 until a few years from now (if they didn't make it), for example...

Debian Lenny frozen

Posted Jul 28, 2008 23:33 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Waiting a little bit for a major release isn't a good idea because there are lots of major
releases all the time for lots of different projects.

Each major release is almost always delayed. Each major release isn't going to work perfectly
when it hits the public so will need some maturing time.

For example:
> Does anything seriously depend on OpenOffice.org, for example?

_I_do_.

Lets assume for a second that I have to deal with a office that depends on OO.org as part of
it's workflow.

This means I have documentation I have to maintain. This means that scripts and macros and
databases and all sorts of little things that I and dozens of other people have built up
around OO.org. Something like MS Office or OO.org isn't just for making spreadsheets or
editing word documents. They are programming environments in their own rights and are used for
all sorts of important office tasks and form the basis for important applications.

This, our personal time and effort, is more important then, say, improved Word compatibility.
If I need word compatibility it's not difficult to have a machine somewhere running Windows
with the latest version of OO.org so that I can test document conversions with MS Office.

As you can imagine delaying a release of a OS in order to shove some new version of OO.org
with a whole new sets of bugs and invalidating at least a portion of the documentation I've
made up as well as macros and other things that people have made is not a attractive concept.

------------------------------

If you want a newer version of OO.org stuck in Lenny it's not a big deal to do yourself.

I don't like apt-pinning because if you do that for something that lots of dependencies it's
easy to pull in a bunch of files from a newer release basically ruining the point of having a
stable release in the first place.

I like things like Backports.org and I like using deb-src and recompiling packages from newer
systems for older systems.

This way the stability of the entire OS can be maintained by Debian while I can have my little
niggling task-specific 'must have' without disrupting it for everybody else.

--------------------

Of course it would be nice when the average Linux distribution person or programmer realizes
the significant advantages of binary distribution from upstream and put effort into making it
work better.

Backports could be the default

Posted Jul 28, 2008 21:38 UTC (Mon) by edmundo (guest, #616) [Link]

What I really mean is, they should freeze libraries and other packages that many other
packages depend on much earlier than they freeze packages which are just applications that
almost nothing depends on.

Does anything seriously depend on OpenOffice.org, for example?

Also, if there is some doubt about whether a major new release of some application is stable
enough, could they include both the old and the new versions in the release?

I'm sure these suggestions have been made before, but I'd be grateful for the standard
response.

Backports could be the default

Posted Jul 28, 2008 22:23 UTC (Mon) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link]

They do that already, libraries were frozen earlier.

The point of stable release is that all the software have been successfully tested together to
be working in a rather fluent way. That's why it's also risky to provide newer versions of
applications into a released stable release.

Maintaining both old and new version of some software has been done before, like with Octave,
but of course it requires a _lot_ of maintenance. There's eg. hardly enough resources to do
single OpenOffice.org version maintaining/testing at the moment, so it would definitely
require several committed volunteers to even think of eg. OOo 3.0 kind of cases provided as an
alternative version.

http://backports.org/ is there to provide some packages a bit more unofficially, ie. they do
not come with the usual kind of guarantee of quality.