linux-watch.com — Debian Etch was supposed to be released on Dec. 4, 2006. Almost two months later, though, according to the Feb. 17th Release Critical Bug Report memo to the Debian Developers Announcement list, there are still 541 "release critical" bugs...
Feb 23, 2007 View in Crawl 4
zerodniFeb 23, 2007
Debian is about, its done when its done.
johnthelutheranFeb 23, 2007
Marked as "inaccurate". The number of RC bugs affecting Etch is actually 98 - the full list of 500+ RC bugs includes ones that are to be ignored (I assume this relates mainly to policy issues such as closed-source firmware) or which only affect packages in Sid. See the RC bugs page at Debian's website: <a class="user" href="http://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/">http://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/</a>That said, there does seem to be a serious problem getting Etch out of the door. The number of RC bugs has been hovering around the 100 mark for almost two months now, and the devs do seem to be running to keep still at the moment. I know "it's done when it's done", but that doesn't mean delays aren't problematic.
deviceguruFeb 23, 2007Submitter
Agreed. Actually, SJVN says that very thing in the article that "If Debian's developers keep up this rate, we'll see Etch released in March of 2008." (It's useful to actually read the stories, sometimes ;-) )
deviceguruFeb 23, 2007Submitter
I guess this is why we need distros like Ubuntu, MEPIS, Freespire/Linspire, Xandros, et al, which provide the masses with the latest from Debian -- and beyond. That's if you want the latest goodies, without having to compile it yourself, anyhow (which does describe me).