[Gllug] [OT] Appreciation

[John Winters]

Juergen Schinker wrote:
> Am Fr, 15.12.2006, 12:27, schrieb John Winters:
>> Juergen Schinker wrote:
>> [snip]
>>> but how much does it take to (re)install any major Debian Release nearly
>>> every half year on any given Debian server
>> That's the first time I've ever seen anyone complain about Debian's
>> major releases being too frequent.
>>
> 
> why is it at all needed?

As I understand the Debian philosophy, the idea of the Stable 
distribution (and we have to be talking about this one if we're talking 
about major releases) is that it should be as stable as it possibly can 
be.  For this reason a vast amount of testing goes into each one and 
then they change very little (security updates only) between releases. 
Far from coming out every six months the last few major releases have been:

Debian 2.2 (Potato)	14th August, 2000
Debian 3.0 (Woody)	19th July, 2002
Debian 3.1 (Sarge)	6th June, 2005

and coming soon to this intermission:

Debian 3.2 (Etch)	Dec 2006

Then there are security updates, which can be handled very easily by 
means of a cron job running each night.  Every now and then a sort of 
roll-up release (incorporating all the security patches to date) is 
made, so that anyone installing a new box can start from there instead 
of having to install the base release followed by all the security 
patches.  Even the latter task though is very simple and 
straightforward.  The current point release is:

Debian 3.1r4 (Sarge)	28th October, 2006

For anyone tracking the security patches, the point releases are irrelevant.

The point of all this is that a server running Stable is very thoroughly 
insulated from surprising changes.  If you want you can carry on running 
the previous stable version even after a new one has come out.  I forget 
how long the security patches continue but it's at least a couple of 
versions.  You can thus have a server that you *know* (or at least, as 
close to knowing as is possible) isn't going to do anything surprising 
and you can carry on with that same installation for 5 years or so; far 
longer than anything other than an IBM mainframe offers you.

> the point is Gentoo hasn't got any major releases...
> and this fact brings it ahead of Debian

I confess I haven't used Gentoo in a few years so I'm not familiar with 
its configuration process.  How does it achieve the same degree of 
guaranteed stability?  It would appear that a distribution has a simple 
choice - either you draw lines in the sand and say, "Nothing changes 
beyond here - you can be sure of exactly what you've got at this point", 
or you don't.  If you draw the line then you have releases and if you 
don't then you don't, but it's difficult to see how you achieve the same 
stable environment without them.

John
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