What do you think about the new Debian release cycle?

Question

I was surprised to know that Lenny already promoted to "stable" - among some of my clients there is some fear that Debian would want to compete with Ubuntu for the desktop and forget its server devotion.

"Only" 2 years between 4.0 Etch and 5.0 Lenny is unprecedented in Debian time scale. Version inflation? is it because SPARC-32 support is being dropped? otherwise the changes between 4.0 Etch and Lenny don't seem bigger than say 3.0 Woody to 3.1 Sarge (3 years apart).

Support was longest for Woody (4 full years), then it was dropped to just under 3 years for both 3.1 and 4.0 (still pretty good, I reckon).

It's still undecided for Lenny but I'd like to know about this before making my next server distro decision.

What are your thoughts about this?

Reference: - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian#Releases - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Debian_releases.svg

Answer 1

Where's the problem? Etch will be supported for one year from now, and upgrading it to Lenny is a matter of typing a few commands.

Debian seems still to be the most serious server distro. It's the rock that Ubuntu is built on.

Answer 2

"Only" 2 years between 4.0 Etch and 5.0 Lenny is unprecedented in Debian time scale. Version inflation? is it because SPARC-32 support is being dropped? otherwise the changes between 4.0 Etch and Lenny don't seem bigger than say 3.0 Woody to 3.1 Sarge (3 years apart).

In a world where transparent development is normal, "major.minor" style version numbers are largely meaningless. Linus and the Ubuntu and Fedora people seem to think the same.

If you have been happy with Debian for your servers, don't switch, just (apt-get) upgrade.

BTW, my brain hurts from looking at that meaningless piece of graph on Wikipedia.