A conversation with Bdale Garbee

Sam Varghese
Monday, 26 January 2009 04:36

Opinion and Analysis

iTWire: I'm not a very technical user, yet I've been running testing on my desktop for four or five years now.

Microsoft Office 365

BG: I think it is important that, when you put systems into a business mission-critical kind of situation, you think very carefully about how you're going to get security updates and all those things. For the average desktop user, testing is a really good choice. It stays reasonably fresh and you certainly are insulated from the worst of the brown-paper kinds of bugs that show up in unstable.

I personally run a mixture of unstable and experimental partly because of an attitude that, as a developer in the project, and sitting in the position I do on the technical committee and so forth, if I can't make it work why would I expect anybody else to be able to?

iTWire: Given your level of technical expertise you could run unstable all the time - you would know how to fix any breakages.

BG: On the other hand, I will admit that my main file server at home only recently switched from running stable to running testing. I'm running testing only because I need to update a few things that the system relies on and as we are getting close to the Lenny release, this would be a good time to get an idea of how close Lenny was getting to be ready to go.

I'm pleased. I've had a 100 percent positive experience with rolling my main server over to Lenny and I think the majority of Debian users are going to be very pleased with this release.

iTWire: Every time there is a delay in a Debian release, people come along and start prophesying that the project is doomed to failure.

BG: The interesting thing to me is that this time I think we're much closer to releasing on schedule than we have been for many releases in the past. I don't really understand why people are so hyper-sensitive to these release schedule issues. I can understand why, for example, teams in HP server division who want to provide official support for Lenny once it's released, have a strong motivation to know when that's going to happen and when they should schedule the engineering time to do the integration and testing work and so forth.

For average users, I honestly don't know why people make such a big deal about release schedules. There's always this question of 'oh, is there some newer shinier release from some other distribution that we're going to get excited about'. I know that there are users who love to bounce around and try the new releases of everything when it comes out.

But I also know a really significant number of people who are wildly enthusiastic about having robust, stable, well-functioning systems and are happy to wait another week, another month, another year or whatever it takes until we're comfortable with the next release.

CONTINUED