Re: 1. RFD: Reorganization of the Debian Project

[Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au>]

please excuse my crappy (rambling) writing today. i'm tired and i've got
the flu.

On Sun, 1 Dec 1996, Fabrizio Polacco wrote:

> So, what could be a solution?
> Well, even if this can appear foolish, I suggest that Debian should give
> up releasing distributions.

i agree.  but that'll be no surprise to anyone because i've been saying this
for ages now anyway :-).

I don't think it's foolish at all. In fact, I think it's the most
sensible use of the wonderful tool which ian has given us in dpkg. dpkg
frees linux from the limitations of distribution release versions - the
only thing that is important is the version number of each individual
package, the distribution version is basically irrelevant.

version control down to the level of individual packages, and easy
(seamless for 99% of packages) upgrades is the number one reason why I
switched to debian 0.93 from slackware. It's still my number one reason
for sticking with debian.


> In this way we could even let one of these become the "official"
> distributor, leaving him the responsibility of _when_ burn the CDs and
> of _what_ put in the installation-lists that will go with the CD.

Maybe the "official" debian cd should be a monthly (or bi-monthly)
subscription to a snapshot CD with the latest stable & unstable trees.
That seems to me to be the best way that people who aren't on the net,
or who don't have ready access to a local mirror of debian can take full
advantage of what debian & dpkg offers.

The "official" debian CD could be just a snapshot of whatever was in the
ftp site on the 1st of the month....with all the benefits and dangers
thereof. Other CD manufacturers could follow suit, or add value by
carefully selecting which versions of various packages went onto their
own CDs. After all, debian IS supposed to be a base distribution which
other distributions can build upon.

A subscription of, e.g., $10/month is likely to be cheaper than what
most people would pay in online time / download volume charges. In fact,
at that price I'd be tempted to give up my mirror, recover almost a gig
of disk space, and save on network bandwidth if it really was released
once/month, without fail.

If we were careful about when we made major changes (e.g. wait until the
day AFTER the CD is pressed before upgrading to libc5.9.99), then we
could have rapid turnover and reasonable stability.

I suspect that this is one of the reasons why we miss our deadlines,
anyway. Most developers (I assume) do what I do and mirror debian
themselves and upgrade whenever they have time to do it...usually
at least once or twice a month. In other words, we use debian in a
completely different manner than most users. IMO, this is the way debian
is meant to be used.

It makes sense to me to make it easier for other users to have the same
opportunity to take full advantage of debian.


> [3] As someone else pointed out, unstable in the last months seemed to
> be more stable (and less buggy) than stable-fixed.

i think that was probably me. I made some comment on debian-devel about
bugs being fixed much quicker on unstable than on stable.

Craig



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