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True. Shuttleworth is the one to blame. Debian move is a capitulation to Ubuntu... and I don't think it's for the best. I just hope they know what they do and still focus on quality, not anyone's marketing needs.

IMHO, I don't think that a strict, or semi-strict like now Debian's, release cycle is productive, at least with short cycles, and I believe is detrimental first to stability and second to innovation. I wish I'm wrong here.

I say this because I think that Ubuntu has been living up until now on the fruits of Debian and not on any merit derived from decision making in the distro, aside of marketing, obviously. As an example of bad administration, language packs in launchpad are NOT sync with upstream. My upstream KDE translations, for example, are not sync back and forth in Ubuntu. This is horribly insane.

Edited 2009-07-29 14:22 UTC

I think that desktop linux users are to 'blame', not Shuttleworth although placing blame seems too severe at this point. Fedora, Mandriva and Ubuntu all have 'regular' release intervals and that is what desktop users have come to expect. If anything this move is to bring some Ubuntu users (and other desktop users) to Debian, not to bow to Ubuntu.

Honestly the erratic release cycle of debian is the largest hurdle keeping me away from it.

Yes.. because.. how would you EVER be able to sleep not knowing if you were to upgrade the software on your computers in april or july? oh teh horror!

Or in Debian's case, *which* April or July. This matters for corporate desktops. I know. I administer them. And Debian's cavalier attitude toward release planning is the #1 reason that we don't even consider using it.

Edited 2009-07-29 15:37 UTC

Do you really administer Corporate Linux Destops? That's awesome. Which distro do you use then? Red hat releases are pretty slow. As are Suse ( last I checked, has this changed?). Ubuntu seems to be the most regular releases of something that might be installed on a corporate desktop.

Yes. Since 1999. But things didn't really start picking up until 2004. That was "the year of the Linux desktop" in my professional world.


Yes. It is. :-)


I've traditionally used a combination of Fedora and CentOS (RHEL, by any other name.) However, I recently finished migrating everything to Ubuntu. So far, my customers and I have been *much* happier with it.

Edited 2009-07-29 16:01 UTC

Or in Debian's case, *which* April or July. This matters for corporate desktops. I know. I administer them. And Debian's cavalier attitude toward release planning is the #1 reason that we don't even consider using it. "
no, it doesnt really matter to corporate desktops, unless ofcourse you need something to occupy yourself with and thus feel like upgrading peoples desktops very regularly?

You are presuming to tell *me* what matters to my customers, and to me as an admin? Careful. I'm the one with the experience in this particular area. (Or please present your credentials.) You don't have to deal with the user complaints about, for example, how certain business critical PDF's won't open in or print from Evince when you know that the latest version can handle it.

And just try apt-get'ing Evince from testing. It will destroy your Debian system.

It is possible to use a distro with a long release cycle, like CentOS. We've done it. But compared to what we are using now, the long release cycle distros are more pain than gain for corporate desktop use. And Debian has the longest release cycle of them all. With unpredictability thrown in just to make it even more appealing.

Edit: In the interest of fairness, I should note that as of RHEL6, Red Hat's release cycle has become even less predictable than Debian's. Which also affects CentOS, of course. Though one can't blame the CentOS guys for that.

Edited 2009-07-29 17:23 UTC

Creating select backports isn't terrible complicated.

Just curious, but why don't you just use Acrobat Reader then in a corporate environment if .pdf's matter that much.
Seems worth it getting the proper 'original' app for this, or was it just and example and not really the only issue.
Myself, I can't find anythin wrong with a two year old system that's still receiving security updates, but then I'm a home user. Lenny is the most stable/solid I've tried though in recent months with absolutely everything working fine (even wireless and with added kernel modules for Vbox and vmware) being the smoothest experience ever, and I thought that would count for something in the business world too?

oh teh noes, a few applications cause you to need to have regular operatingsystem wide release schedules... no offense, but i think im beginning to understand your issues a little bit better

My point was perhaps not clear. I was more pointing towards the length of time between releases and the variability of that time from one release to another.

Although it's true that a large majority of desktop linux users care about having the latest apps, I am more concerned in the case of Debian with hardware support. Stable releases use old kernels right out of the gate and then 18 months later...they are even older.

I build my own computers so a fairly recent kernel is important to me but it comes down to personal preference. Hardware support IS important to me afterall....

For me, it's that most of the packages in stable are pretty old - and, if you want something new, maybe something that came out in the last six months (or a year), it might not be available at all. Unstable doesn't necessarily help much: it's, well, unstable, and while it's packages are a little newer, it may well not have what you want either.

Exactly. The FOSS world moves faster than Debian. Nothing wrong with that; just an observation.

@kragil: the three-letter acronym in "Ubuntu LTS" stands for "Long Term Support" instead of "Long Term Stability".

This means users of this release will receive updates over an extended time frame compared to other Ubuntu releases. Also, commercial support can be paid over a longer time frame.

Accordingly, there is *NO* reason why an LTS release would be designed to be more stable than any other Ubuntu release. In fact, there is no guarantue that an LTS release will give you additional stability and I believe some people experienced more stability issues just after release of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS than just after release of Ubuntu 7.10.

To summarize, *all* Ubuntu releases are designed with the same quality testing procedures. Hence, the only reason why there may be differences in stability between releases is statistical.

PS: of course LTS may become on average more stable at the end of their lifetime as they receive updates over a longer timeframe. So yes, you will statistically get more stability, but only if you only install the LTS release about 16 months (*) after its initial release date.

(*I believe this is how long normale Ubuntu releases are supported?)

Read the whole text.(Thom picked a misleading headline, I am not to blame ) The release will not be time based, only the freeze will be time based. It will still be released "when it is done"(tm).

It's still a time-based release cycle - it's just that because Debian chose a longer timeframe, they also have more leeway between dev freeze and release. Ubuntu also has leeway between dev freeze and release, it's just shorter because the cycle is shorter as well.

Well, what Debian is doing is not a time based release cylce like Fedora, Mandrake or Ubuntu. They will freeze Debian Testing in december and they will start fixing RC bugs. There is no real time line from there on out. Theoretically they could release in january (highly unlikely) or in june (knowing Debian it could even be september)

So time based freeze is a more accurate description of what they are doing unless you consider within +-6 month a fixed time.

http://mdzlog.alcor.net/2009/07/29/debian-is-not-switching-to-time-...

Matt knows more about Debian than 99.99% of OSnews posters .. so for me this argument is settled.

It is misleading stating that
"Debian Adopts Two-Year Time-Based Release Cycle".

The article here quotes the following
"Time-based freezes will allow the Debian Project to blend the predictability of time based releases with its well established policy of feature based releases."

To break it down, they state that they blend two things
1. Time-based release cycle
2. Feature based release

What they get is not a
Time-based release cycle, but a
Time-based freeze cycle.

This change does not indicate that Debian will not be "ready" when a new release arrives. Probably what will occur is that those "not ready" packages will not be shipped in their lastest version, preserving a stable one.

Having an idea of when a new version of Debian will be available - well, I can wait one year at all - is good for planning.

Anyway, if the release looks unstable for you, you can simply choose not to install it and wait for a patch or the next release.

For the end user, it's not when the distro releases but when the current distro stops recieving update packages.

I used this approach with Mandriva for years before giving Debian it's due. When I stop seeing updates for my current Mandriva version, it's time to upgrade. 2007.1 isn't getting updates so it's time to choose between 2008.1 and 2009.#. Ok, it would have been time but Lenny has replaced it on all but my last desktop. In my current case, when 2008.1 on that stops receiving updates, I'll have already confirmed my final question; how does Lenny (or Squeeze by that time maybe) support my Nvidia GPU and Hauppauge tuner board.

(checkinstall has single-handedly taken care of anything not in the repositories that has to go in from tarball.)

It's a two year release cycle; they've left themselves plenty of room to get each release right. They've given themselves four times the time it takes for a Fedora or Ubuntu release, to make (what will probably be) fewer, less-radical changes.

Ever tried the command: "apt-get dist-upgrade" ?

This will upgrade packages that have been kept back because they require dependencies that were previously not installed.

But it doesn't do that at all! Just having a predictable feature-freeze cycle doesn't really do anything to make releases more predictable, really, because there's still a bugfix period. In the last few Debian releases (well, ever since Woody, really), that bugfix period was quite lengthy.

I quite agree, not fully but I agree. They should at least use a 1 year time frame.