[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.