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Release Cycle

2004, 七月 21 - 16:54 — voidoo

It is said that Debian Release Cycle is the longest among those major GNU/Linux distros and the package in stable release is very old. Sometime ago, I collect the release date of Debian and make a table.

Ver. Name Date Period Packages. Developers Features
1.1 Buzz 1996-06   474   2.0 kernel, fully ELF, dpkg
1.2 Rex 1996-12 6m 848 120  
1.3 Bo 1997-07 7m 974 200  
2.0 Hamm 1998-07 1y 1500+ 400+  
2.1 Slink 1999-03-09 8m ~2250   Add Alpha and sparc support
2.2 Potato 2000-08-15 1y 5m 3900+ 450+ Add PowerPC & ARM
3.0 Woody 2002-07-19 1y11m 9000+ ~1000 Add HP, PA-RISC, IA-64, MIPS, MIPS (DEC)
3.1 Sarge 2004-08? 2y      

Surprised me that the release cycle is slowing down in recent releases because of the increasing of supporting architecture. Debian policy stated they will try to backport security fix rather update on stable release to confirm the while debian is as stable as possible. Therefore, it is better to compare the release cycle with Redhat Adv. Server (RHAS) and SuSE Enterprise Server. The release cycle of RHAS is around 12-18 month.