[scrollaway]

Debian implements the comical definition of Bureaucracy really well. Missing the forest for the trees and thinking that every single piece of software is built and released the same way.

For a Linux distro that has been around so long, it's mind boggling they still don't understand that. Wine used to have the same problem - Wine's cycle had the Chrome-like cycle before Chrome even existed. Release every 2 weeks like clockwork. Releases are not any more or less stable than the previous one, but they implement more functionality and a newer release will almost always be better than an older one. Wine's "Stable" releases are meaningless, other than "We spend a month working on bugfixes/regression instead of features before a stable release".

[icebraining]

I think this is a misunderstanding of the goals of Debian Stable.

The purpose is not to get a stable release of each upstream project and build a release from those. The goal is to get any release of each upstream project, test it for a few months to ensure there are no show-stopping bugs and to document the known ones, and then freeze it.

The goal is not to ensure lack of bugs, it's to ensure stability, that is, that no new bugs appear or existing behaviours change.

The goal is to allow the sysadmin to configure the system, test it - working around existing bugs - and leave it running, being reasonably sure that stuff won't randomly break until he upgrades the major version, while remaining secure.

[scrollaway]

The problem then is when this trickles down to projects like Ubuntu. For years, Ubuntu (the desktop distro) had Wine 1.0 as its only version of Wine, when there were something like 40 new development releases of it already available. This caused hundreds upon hundreds of bug reports and user frustrations for no good reason - issues were already fixed in most recent versions of Wine.

I used to do triaging for Wine and I can't tell you how depressing that was, the amount of time wasted by these distro policies.

[mordocai]

Ubuntu isn't based on debian stable so I'm confused as to why you debian's stable release cycle would have anything to do with ubuntu.

[jdmichal]

I'm pretty sure scrollaway was describing the stable release philosophy as trickling down to Ubuntu, not the actual packages.

[dmm]

> Release every 2 weeks like clockwork.

Which means exciting new regressions every two weeks! When I used wine it was definitely the case that certain applications(games) worked better with specific wine versions so a continuous release cycle could result in breaking a working application. That's something users of stable are trying to avoid.

If a user wants the latest version of a package you can always install it manually.

[coldpie]

I don't disagree with anything you said, but I would like to add that if you become aware of a program that used to work, but no longer does, PLEASE file a bug! We take regressions very seriously[1]. There are often reasons they can't be fixed immediately, but more often we can fix it quickly. But we have to know about it first!

[1] We even have an explicit regression tracker that places blame and shame on whoever broke it! http://source.winehq.org/regressions

[voltagex_]

I'd love to report more stuff in Wine but isn't there a requirement to be running the latest/dev branch? This is tricky to do in Debian (because I prefer to build debs of whatever and then install those).

[coldpie]

You will be asked to test it in the latest release, yes, but perhaps someone else can test it for you, or at least get developer eyes on the issue. In any case, it's unlikely to be just closed invalid without any consideration. We would rather know about it than not.

[zanny]

Parent is actually wrong - Wine releases with the Gnome cycle, where even releases are stable and odd ones are unstable. Debian should technically be shipping both versions according to upstream release cadences - people who want stable use 1.8 right now, and people who want latest features use 1.9.

[scrollaway]

In what way am I wrong? Wine releases are in fact every two weeks with a stable release once in a while. How is it relevant that stable are even and unstable are odd?

[zanny]

Because Wine (and Gnome) maintain them in parallel. With Chrome you have the one release version that gets constantly updated every two weeks, but unlike Firefox's ESR / Linux's LTS kernels Google doesn't want to maintain an "LTS" version of Chrome.

Yes, its semantics whether you just pin arbitrary releases and call them LTS vs having dedicated versioning schema to support it, but you called it a Chrome like cycle, when its just a more general constant iteration with occasional LTS cycle. Not many products actually use the full blown constant iteration for everyone model Google uses on Chrome.

[coldpie]

We still release every 2 weeks on the dot. Next release is on Friday.

And our stable branch is changing to yearly releases! We are going to do a code freeze every Fall and release in late Fall or early Winter. It is also going to receive more regular backports of "safe" improvements, so slow distros like Debian can benefit from important fixes. We've already had a dot-dot stable release this year!

http://source.winehq.org/git/wine.git/shortlog/refs/heads/st...

[vacri]

> For a Linux distro that has been around so long, it's mind boggling they still don't understand that.*

They definitely do understand that - they also offer more packages than any other x86 operating system. It's just that they have a reason for doing it their way. The operating system is meant to provide a stable base, and the user can then select particular software for more frequent upgrades by adding their own target repositories. Or using make.

Debian is one of the two major linux distros that other distros source from. It's a bit weird to suggest that they don't really get how software is developed.

[toyg]

It's a bit sad to see "real" distributions have shrunk to 2. In a way, you can say that's more of a case of these growing while everyone else did not (see: Slackware), and that it's a net positive in terms of consistency, but it might also indicate a retreat from experimental approaches. "Different" distributions like Gentoo failed to capitalize on early momentum, and there is now a general expectation that all * nix systems should look like RH or Debian.