The Debian Delay: Is Sarge MIA? Or Simply a POW of Process?

By: Sean Michael Kerner
Thursday, March 3, 2005 02:53:08 PM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/5744/1/

Good Things Come to Those Who Wait

The latest release of Debian Linux, code named "Sarge" was supposed to report for duty at the end of last year. That didn't happen. Why has Sarge been delayed and ultimately does it matter? Debian developers and Debian's founding father talked to LinuxPlanet about Sarge's delay and its ultimate deployment.

The Debian Linux distribution, which according to numerous statistics is one of the most widely, installed Linux distributions today is different from commercial distributions like Red Hat, Novell/SUSE and Mandrake in that it doesn't follow a necessarily predictable release schedule.

"The Debian philosophy has always been release it when it's ready," Ian Murdock, who founded the Debian Project in 1993 (and the Ian part of Debian, the Deb part refers to his wife) told LinuxPlanet. "It's just a continuation of the way Debian has always done things."

That said, 2004 was supposed to be the year in which Sarge was originally expected to be released, though as early as April the first indication that there was trouble became apparent. At that time the groups guiding document the, "Debian Social Contract" was amended to ensure that "free" software only be included in the distribution. Anthony Towns the release manager at the time publicly stated that he felt the move would push Sarge's release into 2005. Towns was ultimately replaced by Andreas Barth as Release Manager.

In another interview with LinuxPlanet, Andreas Barth (Debian Sarge Release Manager) said that a lot of things have changed at Debian since that episode.

"One of the (not so visible changes) is that we have much more of a team (well, no connection with Anthony's resigning, but that's just a current trend) and this has good effect," Barth said. One example he cited was in the previous release (woody) there were 11 different kernel sources while in Sarge there are only 3, which as the net effect of reducing the load on the both the security and the installer teams. In Barth's opinion, Debian now also has better tools than they did before.

"For woody, a lot of things needed to be done by hand, where we now have tools for. (Also, no connection with Anthony going away - it's just a continuing trend) for example, we have a security issue tracker for testing, we have improved our archive scripts, we have improved our testing migration scripts, we have a very stable toolchain (gcc, glibc,), and we have a stock solid installer," he said.

The time investment made in Sarge will payoff for future versions of Debian as well according to Barth. "Our toolset is much better than it ever was for a stable release, means: We invested lots of time into Sarge, which will make our next releases faster and better," he said.

Debian Developer Martin "Joey" Schulze noted that the task of getting a stable Debian release out the door involves a large volume of work. "You must not forget that Debian has several tons of different packages and has to support eleven different architectures with two more waiting behind the door, " Schulze explained. "Both can only be achieved with a well-designed infrastructure that works more or less automatically when it comes to updating."

The Predictable Release Cycle

For some the delayed release and lack of predictable schedule from Debian is not a problem for others it is. "From a commercial providers point of view it’s a problem," Ian Murdock said. "When you're basing on something that doesn't have a well articulated or predictable release cycle or roadmap clearly your job becomes a lot harder."

Debian has grown over the years from a handful of people when Murdock began the project to the massive group that it is today. Growing pains and scalability issues are part of that growth according to Murdock, though Debian has risen to similar challenges before.

"It's a similar sort of problem that Debian has run into over the years and throughout the years people have said the Debian model has scaled as far as it can scale and that has clearly proven to not be true," Murdock said.

Does it really matter if Sarge is ever actually released?

"Whether this matters is, of course, an interesting question," Debian developer Matthew Garret said. "The success of Ubuntu, Skolelinux and other Debian-derived products shows that it's not required for Debian to release in order to get our code into the world. Indeed, some people have argued that Debian should give up on the idea of releasing at all and instead, Debian should be the infrastructure that other people would use to build projects."

Garrett however disagrees with that premise. He argues that one of the most powerful motivating forces in free software is the ability to look at something and think, "I helped build that".

"Making releases encourages people to work towards that release, and the net result is better software," Garrett said.

Ian Murdock is also of the opinion that Debian releases do matter and that Debian should continue to make its own releases.

"The main reason for that is if every Debian provider used Debian as just a loosely defined set of packages every provider is essentially going to be implementing its own product on top of that loosely defined set of packages and there are going to be incompatibilities between the different Debian based products," Murdock explained.

"It's far more effective if you have a single core platform that you can build above as opposed to this ever changing universe of software," he said. "It's very important that Debian continues to maintain its own release process rather than going off and Debian splintering into a bunch of different variants."

In Murdock's view the only thing that Debian needs to do to get to that point is to have a predictably release schedule. "It doesn't matter what the duration is so long as we all know what it is and we can base our roadmaps around it accordingly," he said.

The Sarge Release. When?

The ultimate release of Debian Sarge will also serve as to highlight the difference between it and commercial distributions. "When Sarge will be released, it will demonstrate once more that Debian isn't keen on implementing half-hearted solutions or will release without the distribution, the archive and security support in perfect shape," Debian developer Martin "Joey" Schluze said. "This is one of the most important differences to commercial distributions where stuff will be released when the time has come."

"Debian will release the distribution when it is ready and when the infrastructure is in place," he said.

In terms of issues that are potentially holding back Debian Sarge at this point, release manager Andreas Barth said that there was nothing large but that the small issues outstanding still will take some time. "We need to have security support, we need a new release candidate of our installer, and we need to sort out a lot of smaller issues," Barth said.

"But we are expecting it soon. On the small level, I can see progress almost every day."