The benefits of instability
There has been considerable discussion of Ubuntu by Debian developers, and LWN [sub], amongst others.
I have one additional observation: Debian's so-called inability to release may be a key to Debian's success.
Free software projects get the most benefit from community testing just before and just after a release. Few people other than the developers and the most hardcore users want to use an outright experimental branch, so those things never get much testing. Conversely, a truly stable release tends to find a decreasing number of bugs over time, and so get less benefit from the high number of users testing it.
Projects get the most benefit from having a large number of users trying out code that has lots of bugs to find, but that is not so buggy as to scare users away. Different projects have different systems for signalling this: the Linux kernel has "x.y.0" releases, others have "release candidate" snapshots, etc. Small projects like distcc can just try to stay in this state all the time, trying to make not too many and not too few changes in each release.
In recent years, Debian has had trouble getting stable releases out regularly. Many people run unstable/testing, even if they'd rather just have a timely stable release. This is often seen as a problem that should be fixed, but in an evolutionary sense, it's probably good for Debian: all those people are essentially roped into testing unstable.
If Ubuntu does manage to do timely 6 month releases, I may just use those releases. Ubuntu won't get the benefit of so many testers on their unstable builds.
(This is more of a thought experiment than an argument for either distribution or any release policy.)
posted Sun 24 Oct 2004 in /software/ubuntu | link
Archives 2008: Apr Feb 2007: Jul May Feb Jan 2006: Dec Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Jun Jan 2005: Sep Aug Jul Jun May Apr Mar Feb Jan 2004: Dec Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Jun May Apr Mar Feb Jan 2003: Dec Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Jun May
Copyright (C) 1999-2007 Martin Pool.