Manoj Srivastava resigns as Debian secretary [LWN.net]

Manoj Srivastava resigns as Debian secretary

Posted Dec 19, 2008 6:07 UTC (Fri) by mikov (guest, #33179)
In reply to: Manoj Srivastava resigns as Debian secretary by dlang
Parent article: Manoj Srivastava resigns as Debian secretary

"""
for desktop systems where there are a lot more programs where the updates matter (and a lot more interdependance between component versions), Debian is a horrible choice. for that I need something that releases more frequently.
"""

I don't know, man... My experience is actually the opposite. Having the non-LTS version of Ubuntu on a development machine has been a nightmare. Days of wasted time, failed upgrades, etc. Rinse and repeat every 6 months. I can't even imagine what a "regular" person would do if they had it at home. Upgrade every six months? Really?? Come on! Do "real people" actually do that?

I feel pretty comfortable with Debian stable and backports. I think it would help a lot if backports were supported "officially".

I always compare the situation to Windows. You practically never upgrade the OS there.

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Manoj Srivastava resigns as Debian secretary

Posted Dec 19, 2008 6:22 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

many people do upgrade every 6 months. many of those people wait a few weeks after a release is made before doing the upgrade so that the biggest isues can be found.

with Ubuntu you have the option of upgrading every 6 months, every 12 months, or every 18 months without loosing support (other then in the time between the release at the 18 month mark and the time you move to it). this is ignoring the LTS releases.

in practice people either upgrade at the 6 month point (if they are looking for some new feature) or at the 12 month point (at that point there are almost always new features you want, plus it give you testing time before loosing support)

Fedora has a 12 month support cycle with a 6 month release cycle, that means that to remain supported they need to upgrade every 6 months (or 12 months with a small gap in support)

people running gentoo or debian testing/unstable tend to upgrade far more frequently (monthly, weekly, or sometimes daily). it helps that these two distros do a pretty good job of upgrading seamlessly. as I noted above, this sort of upgrade cycle is not suitable for larger installations.

in my opinion about every year is the sweet spot between constant upgrades and missing features for relativly fast moving evnironments like desktops

Manoj Srivastava resigns as Debian secretary

Posted Dec 19, 2008 15:53 UTC (Fri) by mikov (guest, #33179) [Link] (1 responses)

"""
with Ubuntu you have the option of upgrading every 6 months, every 12 months, or every 18 months without loosing support (other then in the time between the release at the 18 month mark and the time you move to it). this is ignoring the LTS releases.
"""

I did not know that. How does it work out in practice - do they provide security support for two non-LTS releases back? Can you upgrade directly from release-2 to current, or do you have to do it in stages? The latter would be a major pain.

BTW, I am not sure that I agree that "regular" people upgrade every 12 months. The "regular" people who I know (e.g. my wife), if they used Linux at all, wouldn't want to upgrade ever. In practice they wouldn't be able to perform even a single upgrade anyway - almost none of my own Ubuntu upgrades have been completely trouble free. Perhaps a paid support contract from Canonical would help there, but $250/year may seem pricey...

(Of course the same problem applies to Windows too - when my wife installed Vista's SP1 on her own on her laptop her sound stopped working and the screen reset to 640x480, which actually prevents you from seeing the "OK" buttons of most dialogs :-)

Ubuntu upgrades (was: Manoj Srivastava resigns as Debian secretary)

Posted Dec 25, 2008 8:47 UTC (Thu) by TRS-80 (guest, #1804) [Link]

I did not know that. How does it work out in practice - do they provide security support for two non-LTS releases back? Can you upgrade directly from release-2 to current, or do you have to do it in stages? The latter would be a major pain.

Non-LTS releases receive 18 months of security support, however upgrades from release-2 to current has to be done in stages. LTS releases get 3 years of desktop support and 5 years of server support, and you can upgrade directly from one LTS release to another.

There are some caveats with this: the upgrade process, particularly LTS to LTS, is pretty fragile compared to Debian, which has very smooth upgrades thanks to the daily upgrade testing provided by testing and unstable. The other is support is only guaranteed for packages in main, which is fairly limited, and the stable release update (SRU) process is very slow.