Dear Mr/Ms. Debian :) I'm a long time debian user (since 1996 - in IT it's a long time:) both on my servers (been setting up a local ISP with debian, nowadays supporting a software development company with it) and development workstation.
Like probably many other users, I'm facing a growing pain to stay on debian stable due to the fact that things like PHP and python are outdated. I've backported PHP 4.3.3 last week, I would hardly pretend it's a good packaging, but it just fit our needs. Right now I need to develop on python twisted matrix, and this piece of software evolved quite a bit since "stable" epoch, furtemore I need python >> 2.1 for another library, which simply prevent me from using twisted shipped with stable. It's just an example of the compromise btwn having the stable branch of one particular software (php, python) to have our developers and customers happy and staying on debian stable, which is outdated. On my own workstation, I'm using unstable since awhile. Our job is to develop and we want to host what we build on debian, but debian stable is becoming less and less able to support what we build, we can't stay with PHP/Python dating from 2 years back. At the same time I'm wondering to the number of packages debian support. Someday I wake up and dreamed I was THE DEBIAN DICTATOR which bumped out 6000 packages at once. Just to keep a "core" debian of ~300 packages and some debian subproject around each big pieces like apache, php, python, xfree, non-web internet services etc.. More seriously, my point is: Is there any hope to one day, to adapt debian to the number of packages it bears and split release cycles between a core of 300-500 packages and having the rest of packages evolving at their own pace, following the core? syncing so much package around "release" schedule is becoming unrealistic. I'm waiting testing to become stable for so long. Anyway, thanks for the great work on this great distro! I'm just concerned for it's future. thanks in advance philippe strauss
