| Where the heck is Etch? |
Feb. 22, 2007
Opinion -- Last September, some of the Debian Linux distribution's leadership wanted to make sure that Etch, the next version of Debian, arrived on its December 4th due date. So, the "Dunc-Tank" group decided to experiment with financially supporting some key developers to get Debian out the door on time.
Whoops.
Debian has a reputation for being almost as late as Duke Nukem Forever, the perpetually never-arriving PC first person shooter game. Not all developers were pleased at this experiment in speeding up Debian development.
In fact, some of developers, according to Andreas Barth, a Debian developer and Etch release manager, felt that the Etch release was getting delayed because "Some people who used to do good work reduced their involvement drastically."
Since then, Barth clarified that what he really meant was that Dunc-Tank had resulted in both "positive and negative effects." And, he continued, "I'm quite happy with the involvement of most Developers in the release."
That said, the Debian Etch code was frozen on December 11th, a week after the final operating system was to be released. By operating system release schedule standards that's only a teeny bit off.
This was not a hard freeze, however. Barth wrote, "As always, it is the release team's goal to get as much good software into Etch as possible." Later in the freeze memo, Barth remarked, "We don't ask you not to make changes in unstable, but we do ask that you be aware of the effects your changes can have -- especially if you maintain a library. Please continue to keep disruptive changes out of unstable."
So "changes," and not just "release critical" (RC) changes, were still being allowed even after the freeze. Still, by December 24th, Barth was able to write, "There are a few items to resolve so that we could actually release. We need your help there -- in whichever area you want to help us, please do so. Please remember: Releasing of Debian is a common effort of the whole community."
Almost two months later, though, according to the February 17th Release Critical Bug Report memo to the Debian Developers Announcement list, there are still 541 release critical bugs.
Now, that's not quite as bad as it sounds. Of those, 72 have patches and 20 haves fixes that haven't been uploaded yet. The vast majority of bugs aren't in testing yet, but many of them also aren't really mission critical for the operating system itself. For example, there is a pair of errors relating to Zope, the open-source application server for content management systems in Etch.
Is that important? To Zope users, yes. Is it important for most Debian users? No.
Still, when all is said and done, there currently are at least 93 Etch release critical bugs left. In the January 5th Release Critical Bug Report, there were 107.
If Debian's developers keep up this rate, we'll see Etch released in March of 2008.
Now, I could be completely off with that estimate. However, when I look over the Debian Developer list, I see many bugs still being hashed out.
Russell Coker, a Debian developer and Linux programmer, explained Debian's slow motion development problem in a note to another developer about making a security change in Debian. "In Debian ... every person controls their little area and has no requirement to work towards common goals (apart from the most obvious ones of making the system work)."
Coker continued, "This means that instead of having a little cooperation from other developers anyone who wants to get a significant change included will have to fight hundreds of battles."
To me, that seems to sum up Debian's slow development process in a nutshell. I asked Barth and Anthony Towns, the Debian Project Leader for their thoughts on Debian's delays, and when we might expect to see Etch released. At the time this article was written, I had not heard back from either of them.
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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