Hi,
On Tue, Mar 04, 2025 at 02:16:23PM +0530, Sarbjit Singh Sandhu wrote:
> Dear Debian Developers,
You have addressed your email to debian-user. Here we are all just
users of Debian like you. We cannot make changes to the policies of the
Debian project directly.
If you wanted to discuss your ideas with people who *can* make changes
then it might be better to send it to the debian-project mailing list.
However…
> I am writing to propose the creation of a new Debian branch that offers a
> stable release every year
Debian is a volunteer organisation. It makes releases roughly according
to how much available volunteer time there is. As such I expect the
effort of a yearly stable release would be judged to be too high.
> as opposed to the current 5-year cycle.
Debian does not have a 5 year cycle. See "Index of releases" at:
https://www.debian.org/releases/
12 Bookworm 2023-06-10
11 Bullseye 2021-08-14 (~665 days earlier)
10 Buster 2019-07-06 (~770 days earlier)
9 Stretch 2017-06-17 (~749 days earlier)
8 Jessie 2015-04-25 (~784 days earlier)
The longest gap here is 784 days and the shortest 665 days, mean average
~742 days, which is very very far off the ~1,825 days you have
suggested.
5 years is more like the maximum support time without Extended Long Term
Support - have you considered that maybe your institution chooses to
wait 5 years between upgrades because they too find that convenient,
instead of doing an upgrade as soon as they possibly could (after ~742
days)? If so then it sounds like your complaint is with your
institution, not Debian.
> I believe this could be achieved by creating a new branch that is based on
> Debian Stable but receives more frequent updates, similar to how Ubuntu LTS
> works but with a shorter cycle.
The great thing is that since Debian is free and open source software,
even though Debian might not have time to halve their release cycle time
to suit you, *you* can start a derivative of Debian that does this! As
you say it could be like Ubuntu but with a shorter release cycle. All it
needs is a vast amount of effort. Good luck!
Thanks,
Andy
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