Once again I am reading about the infamous debian release cycle. I agree that having a stable distro is important, but so is having up to date support for critical items. For most of the packages in Debian, not having the latest version is not a big deal as these packages are so mature that grabing the source for the next version and installing it yourself won't break anything else. HOWEVER a fair number of packages MUST be CAREFULLY intergrated into the distribution or they WILL be broken, or break something else. Going between MAJOR kernel versions (2.2.x > 2.3/4.x), XFree86_3.3 -> XFree86_4.0, etc WILL break many things and is something the casual linux user will NOT want to try to do him/her self.
When major libs change (glibc2.0 -> 2.1) almost EVERYTHING COULD break. Changes of this order very well might require a complete distro upgrade, better to do such lib changes at release time, even if debian lags behind the power curve as a result. Can debian do better? Maybe. Could it be possible to create an upgrade task package that would upgrade ALL the necessary packages, scripts, etc needed to go from one kernel major version to the next WITHOUT a complete distro release? How about the same for Xfree86?. If these major components can change without breaking too many packages (requiring upgrades of the broken packages, probably mostly those in admin) then maybe these system upgrade tasks would allow Debian users to keep current without waiting for the next distro release. PS. I am currently running Potato on one computer and have had only very minor problems (mostly with package depandancies being broken briefly while new verisons were being uploaded. The developers have quickly fixed these problems on the download site.) You are progressing nicely though the freeze I think. ===== Amateur Radio, when all else fails! http://www.qsl.net/wa2mze Debian Gnu Linux, Live Free or ..... __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Talk to your friends online with Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com
