I read with interest the extensive discussion surrounding Debian's future release plans. As I have been a user of Debian, both as a developer and as part of my work, I should have an opinion. So here it is.

It might be worth dwelling a moment on just how amazing Debian's package management is. The idea of supporting — what is it, 11 architectures? — across the whole range of many thousands of packages, is no small feat. Having buildds that automatically compile packages, providing build logs so developers can see the cause of build failures on obscure architectures, and activaly blocking packages until they are able to compile on enough platforms — this has put portability and compilability of the packages as a major project goal.

If Debian is to get used on servers, it has to make stable, supported releases. There are nearly 800,000 websites running Debian now; we are within shooting distance of being on the same scale as RedHat. A year ago Debian was the fastest growing; now the moment has passed, and with Fedora making regular releases, they have got the credibility now.

It is hard to advocate Debian for use in a live application when there is no viable stable release. Nobody wants to build a server today with a 3 year old OS (age by itself is not necessarily a problem, but age and the nearness of replacement and so obsolecence is). Woody should be unsupported in 6 months; conversely, sarge may not be supported for another 12 months, for all we know right now. So which one do people like me, who use Debian on servers at work, use? Right now, while I use Debian for development systems, I don't feel that I can advocate either release for new servers.

It is not easy, looking on, to see precisely what has gone wrong. I can see that basic software, like zsync, normally makes its way into testing without much fuss. It is unclear whether the problem is purely numbers (with so many platforms, at least one is sure to have problems?) or the small developer base of some of the platforms (few developers to clear problems, manage buildds?). But it clearly has gone very badly wrong, with not only no releases for years but apparently, until very recently, no clear sign that there was any definite timeframe for getting one.

Assuming Debian targets any live, production use, it has to make stable releases. Making these releases, for i386 as a minimum, is essential for new users starting with Debian, and necessary for Debian to continue to see use in stable environments. Frankly, it's not essential for these stable releases to cover every platform, as developers can always use testing on those other platforms (and so those other platforms will not be suitable for servers). Debian should drop as many architectures from the stable release target as is necessary to make annual stable releases. Having some stable architectures is better than none.