Murdock calls for timely Debian releases

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This was published 18 years ago

Murdock calls for timely Debian releases

The man who began the Debian GNU/Linux Project has called on the current leaders to come up with a predictable release cycle, at intervals of 12 or 18 months.

Ian Murdock made the call in a posting to his blog. His call comes a few days after Sarge, version 3.1 of Debian, was released after nearly three years of development.

Debian is a free operating system based on the Linux kernel. It supports a total of 11 processor architectures and includes the KDE, GNOME and GNUstep desktop environments.

Mr Murdock began the project in 1993; the name is derived from his first name and that of his wife (Debra). He is no longer with the project, having begun a distribution called Progeny, based on Debian.

Apart from the release cycle, Mr Murdock said the Debian project should attempt to keep the growing family of Debian derivatives united around the common core of the distribution.

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A large number of the Linux distributions in existence are based on either Red Hat Linux or Debian. Some of the better-known ones based on Debian are Corel, Stormix (both now defunct), Progeny, Linspire, Xandros, KNOPPIX, LinEx, Skolelinux, MEPIS, and Ubuntu.

Mr Murdock said in the case of the distributions based on Red Hat, many had splintered into different and incompatible varieties.

However, in the case of the Debian-based derivatives, after all these years they were still compatible with Debian.

"Debian's popularity as a base distro goes beyond technology. In many ways, Debian facilitates the Linux equivalent of 'Think globally, act locally'," Mr Murdock said.

A predictable release cycle would make it easier for industry to interface with the Debian project, he said.

"We need to better engage the ISVs (independent software vendors), IHVs (independent hardware vendors), and OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) that want to support Debian but aren't quite sure how to do it. They want to engage us, not just because we're a global player, but because we're a non-commercial, community project."

Mr Murdock said this was essential because a number of users needed it.

On his other recommendation, he said while the derivatives were not significant players on their own, collectively they dwarfed the commercial Linux leaders, Red Hat and Novell/SUSE.

"Debian's opportunity, then, is to connect the derivatives into the powerful, global force they have the potential to become, to nurture a sort of 'network of peers' approach to service and support to replace the traditional, vertically integrated model that's being used by today's leading commercial vendors," he said.

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