When I first read about the hard freeze of Trixie – the next stable Debian version – I got excited, and looked up the remaining release-critical bugs page. I don’t remember the exact number as of May 18th, but it was around the 260 mark. As of now, it’s at 178:
I had seen it fallen below 200, but sometimes new bugs are added, so more work for those who are closing them, but better for us all. Once that green line is at 0 (zero), it’s ready as in Debian’s motto quando paratus est – they’ll release when it’s ready, not when some CEO shouts loud enough. Bonus heart points to Debian, as always 🙂
I’ve read elsewhere that one should avoid Linux distributions which release regularly, the main reason being given that not all bugs have CVE numbers, so they wouldn’t even get fixes, and simply taking a rolling release (like Arch, or in a sense, Debian Sid) would be better because you’d always have the latest and greatest software from upstream (the developers of those software packages). I don’t buy it. If a bug doesn’t have a CVE number, then mostly the devs of that package don’t know about the bugs as well, and many of the closed bugs in distributions like Debian, Fedora, and so on will go upstream and be fixed in newer versions because there are fixes already.
True; in Arch or other constantly updated distributions, you’ll always have the latest and greatest – I just got kernel 6.15 in Arch for instance:
I nevertheless find the work of the Debian devs important, and I’m very thankful for it. I trust these people because I know many of them, met them at local groups for breakfast or in pubs, and I helped the Debian team at gatherings like Linuxtag or FOSDEM already, I would have become a Debian developer myself, hadn’t I’ve been interrupted from that by joining commercial IT at my last employer (here in Frankfurt). That was good because it brought food onto the table, but I didn’t really have time for other things except family and work anymore…
Anyway, that’s history. Just wanted to take this as an opportunity to say thanks to the Debian team – oh, and to Arch as well of course. And thanks to you for reading, as always.
P.S.: as you can see at the release-critical bug status page, the number of RC bugs for Trixie is already lower than the one of the current stable release, which is Bookworm – so in case you’ll have a test machine around, try Trixie if you’re so inclined. I sometimes do that before the release day as well. Or even better, if you are capable to look at that bug list and close a few of them, that would be excellent! 🙂