Debian Etch to be Released in December

lord_rob the only on writes "According to a ZDNet article, the next release of Debian should be available in December 2006. From the article : 'The date represents a dramatic improvement in the regularity of Debian's development cycle. Etch will be shipped only 18 months after the previous release, version 3.1.'

Change every occurence of stable into sarge

[Alphager]

in /etc/apt/sources.list and enjoy the bugfixes and security-updates for another 18 months.

Re:AMD64?

[colonwq]

From the article:
One of the major new features of Etch will be official support for the 64-bit x86 architecture which is becoming increasingly used in servers.

:wq

Re:This is a bad idea

[Phleg]

Assuming a standard 18-month release cycle, they would support a distribution for exactly the three years offered by RedHat. Each previous version of "stable" is supported for eighteen months, so support for Woody should be phased out as soon as Etch is released. If they keep with the standard release cycle, eighteen months after that when Etch+1 is released, Sarge support will be phased out.

Re:Damnit!

[swillden]

Who says you have to upgrade instantly? I know a bunch of people running FC1, or even RH9 or 7.3. If it works, you don't have to touch it

It's not a good idea to run systems, especially if they're Internet-facing, on old releases that don't get security updates.

That said, Sarge will continue getting security updates until the successor to Etch is released, so there's no problem with continuing to run it for a couple of years yet, even if Debian manages to keep up the 18-month cycle.

Re:an improvement?

[AmishMoshr]

Close, but not quite... Hoary and Breezy are only supported for 18 months after their initial release. Dapper, on the other hand, will have 3 years of desktop support/updates and 5 years of "server" updates. So Dapper is the only one that really has literal full years of support.

Re:Damnit!

[Überhund]

>> Who says you have to upgrade instantly? I know a bunch of people running FC1,
>> or even RH9 or 7.3. If it works, you don't have to touch it

> It's not a good idea to run systems, especially if they're Internet-facing,
> on old releases that don't get security updates.

The Fedora Legacy Project [fedoralegacy.org] provides security updates for RedHat and Fedora releases that have been end-of-lifed by RedHat. Currently, they support RH 7.3 and 9, and Fedora 1-3.