2 updates per month should have delta updates

I'm not sure that you nor I, as beneficiaries of the work put into any particular linux distro can really claim "success" on behalf of distro we use. Success is only measurable in the context of prescribed and intentional goals. Has the product met the goals originally set forth? If it doesn't its not a success. It missed the mark. But that doesn't mean it was a waste of time or utterly devoid of merit. Something which fails to succeed can be a very useful thing.

Utility, or otherwise stated, usefulness, can be much more easily determined in an ad hoc fashion, after the fact, with no concern at all as to what the original intent was. Something does not have to succeed to have significant utility to you, or me, or to society. But to call such utility a success, is a mischaracterization of the product and a missed opportunity to learn something vital about the marketplace in which the product was introduced. Indeed, products can be successful and have zero utility for me personally. And similarly, if a product fails to be useful to me personal, I can make not claim that it is a failure. There many examples of successful products that personally find useless.

Now obviously products that fail to succeed can still be useful, can still have utility.. and very observant entrepreneurs and experimenters and can learn from such useful failures and retool or redirect them into successes by learning from the original _failure_ and defining new goals and building towards those goals. But just simply moving the goal posts about what success means without acknowledging the failure, is just rationalizing delusion which prevents a deep learning, assessment and understanding of the market. Such good feel revisionism only makes it harder to effectively define goals and reach true product success in the iterative process of product refinement.

That being said. I think Debian is pretty successful in the context of the project's stated goals. But I would also add, that if the Debian project was being created from scratch today, I think the project would make a number of different technology choices. I'd wager that project architects would be heavily influenced by day-to-day use of "app" distributions used by other platforms and would build on that model instead of the packaging model commonly in use now. What exists now in linux projects is as much about inertia and familiarity as it is about technical superiority for a given set of prioritized requirements.

-jef