I know others have expressed this, but a big reason we wind up with slower release cycles is we have a stable unstable. i.e. unstable is rather stable. Most of the other distributions start with the software that will be released by the time they release and start working with it early.
What I really mean: unstable should (as soon as work on potato is finished), have the new perl, xfree, apache, kernel, etc. Even if they are still release canidates. the sooner we have everything working with the new packages, the sooner we can release. For example, to wait till perl 5.6 is out to try to integrate it could take longer that to start the integration process with a perl release canidate. It is the unstable branch, lets take advantage of it and make it unstable to start out with. The sooner we can find problems and fix them, the shorter our release cycles will be, and the more upto-date our main packages will be. Andrew Lenharth Remember, never ask a geek "why"; just nod your head and back away slowly... ------------------------------ Given infinite time, 100 monkeys could type out the complete works of Shakespeare. Win 98 source code? Eight monkeys, five minutes. ------------------------------