question about Debian's slow release cycle

newbiesforever · 09-15-2009, 01:35 PM

Debian seems to be the distro with the most other distros based on it. (Unless I'm wrong, I've supposed this is because, as I've heard, Debian tends to be a favorite of developers.) Could one reason be that developers who use Debian get impatient with the Debian Project's slow and strict release cycle, and write distros that use Debian but can have their own release cycles?

TITiAN · 09-15-2009, 02:31 PM

I guess it's because Debian isn't as straightforward as others are, but technically a great distro (you can get new packages from the "testing" [codenamed "squeeze" at the moment] repo, btw).

Look at Ubuntu: Everything is graphical, and a lot of things are automated (e.g. acquiring an IP in an ethernet network via DHCP, installation of NVidia drivers...), which isn't the case in Debian.

BTW Debian now has a 2-year-release (correction: freeze) -cycle: http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090729

brianL · 09-15-2009, 02:39 PM

Debian doesn't issue a new release 'til it's good and ready, some of its offshoots issue releases to a schedule whether they're ready or not.

TITiAN · 09-16-2009, 04:37 AM

Correction: The 2-year cycle refers to freezing the distro, which means that brianL is right about the "'till it's good and ready" thing, though we can expect a release every two years.