Shawn wrote:
> Second, I've been looking at Debian as another distro to install on a
> system.  However, the one thing holding me back from it for the most
> part is the stable version is still at 2.2.19 kernel it looks like.
> Can someone explain  why Debian is so far behind in their stable
> release compared to all the other distros?   

Debian's release cycle is a slow process.  I don't think that'll ever
change.  There have been proposals to speed up things a bit, but there's
one major policy change that would have to take place, release-critical
and security bugs would have to be allowed to exist.

Sounds pretty insane, doesn't it?  Debian's stable distribution will
always be stable and frozen.  No new packages for the stable
distribution will ever be introduced into the central archive.  There
are a number of proposed-updates that make their way through, but these
are for security bugfixes mainly.  There are few low-priority bugfixes
that make their way into stable, if any.

If you'd like a more up-to-date snapshot of software, use Debian's
testing distribution.  It's halfway between unstable and stable, so it's
normally had pretty thorough user testing from the unstable branch.
i.e. packages migrate from unstable to stable when no bugs greater than
a severity of "normal" exist on it or any packages it depends upon.  Oh,
yeah, the bug-tracking system for debian is intrinsically tied into
package management, and thusly into the release management process.

Having otherwise would be pure suicide given the size of the
distribution and number of developers.  All-in-all, the distribution is
one of the most dynamic and most stable in all of the Linux world.  I
would be interested in seeing some statistics on how much change goes on
in unstable and testing branches.  The sheer volume would be astounding.

Anyway, back to work.

-- 
Chad Walstrom <chewie at wookimus.net>                 | a.k.a. ^chewie
http://www.wookimus.net/                            | s.k.a. gunnarr
Get my public key, ICQ#, etc. $(mailx -s 'get info' chewie at wookimus.net)
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