At a time when banks are shedding IT roles by the dozen, it seems counter-intuitive that 83 per cent of the nation’s chief information officers should report they are confident about the future of their business to the extent that 45 per cent expect to hire IT staff in the first six months of the year. The question remains – is this a dead cat bounce?
The policy was proposed and adopted at the project's yearly conference which is taking place in Caceres, Spain.
According to the scheme, details of which have been released by project spokesperson, Meike Reichle, from now on freezes will take place in the December of every odd year - 2009, 2011 and so on.
That means the next freeze is just five months away.
Reichle said the releases would take place in the Northern (corrected) spring of the following year. The timings of the freeze and release had been chosen because they had proved successful in the cases of the last two releases, Etch and Lenny.
"Time-based freezes will allow the Debian Project to blend the predictability of time based releases with its well established policy of feature based releases," Reichle said.
"The new freeze policy will provide better predictability of releases for users of the Debian distribution, and also allow Debian developers to do better long-term planning.
"A two-year release cycle will give more time for disruptive changes, reducing inconveniences caused for users. Having predictable freezes should also reduce overall freeze time."
For a long time, the policy of the Debian project has been "release when it's ready." This had led to unpredictable release times, with one release, Sarge, taking more than three years to be made.
Given the increasing corporate use of GNU/Linux, there has been pressure on Debian from various quarters to adhere to some kind of time-based release process. This pressure increased no end after the emergence of Ubuntu, based on the unstable branch of Debian, which has tied its releases to the six-monthly release cycle of the GNOME Desktop Project.
The last Debian release, Lenny, was made on on February 14. Due to this, Reichle said, "...there will only be approximately a one year period until its next release, Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 (codenamed "Squeeze"). This will be a one-time exception to the two-year policy in order to get into the new time schedule.
"To accommodate the needs of larger organisations and other users with a long upgrade process, the Debian project commits to provide the possibility to skip the upcoming release and do a skip-upgrade straight from Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 ("Lenny") to Debian GNU/Linux 7.0 (not yet codenamed).
"Although the next freeze is only a short time away, the Debian project hopes to achieve several prominent goals with it. The most important are multi-arch support, which will improve the installation of 32-bit packages on 64-bit machines, and an optimised boot process for better boot performance and reliability."
Debian, which was set up in 1993, provides ports for more architectures than any other GNU/Linux distribution. The distribution is highly regarded, especially for its software management capabilities.
Michelle Thomas
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