One of the reasons I tend not to blog very much is that I don't have much to say to the Planet Debian audience (the only place I know my blog is syndicated) that hasn't been said a dozen times before. But the world's best release party (the one good enough to cross an ocean for) gave me food for thought, and for once I'm inspired in the true spirit of blogging to write even if nobody cares what I have to say. Even if it has taken me until two months after the release to write it...
Folks within the Debian community have been asking for years whether it's really still worthwhile for Debian to do stable releases, or if we're better off focusing on our "core competency" of testing and unstable and leaving stable releases to derivatives. For me, the answer to this question is an unqualified: yes, it's worthwhile.
Of course that's the answer you'd expect from a release manager. Who would want to believe after committing as much time as the release team does that their efforts had been wasted? But the investment I've made in the etch release wasn't done without reflection; I recognize that the level of involvement required to be a release manager has come at some personal cost to me, as it does for each member of the release team, and I have made the investment anyway because I believe in Debian's philosophy, its goals, and its community.
Even outside of a stable release, Debian packages really are great; in spite of the bugs and library transitions that we as release managers spend our time on in unstable and testing, and figures showing that within a month of the etch release we already had some 500 RC bugs identified for lenny, both unstable and testing do a great job of meeting the needs of many of our users. And package maintainers are constantly improving their packages in unstable, fixing bugs and adding new features. Unstable is a flowing river, vibrant and vital, never the same twice -- and only rarely are people dragged to their deaths by the undertow. ;)
Maintainers often don't get to choose the version of their package that goes into stable. When it comes to a stable release, the bug you know is quite often better than the bug you don't. But although the release team is charged with chasing out the release-critical issues in preparation of a stable release, it isn't just the release team who deserves credit for etch. Etch is a monument to the work of all Debian maintainers, who have each helped shape the release with their contributions. "Stable" doesn't mean "perfect", but it does mean "lasting": in etch we have not only created what I think is the highest-quality OS I've ever had the privilege to be involved in, we have created something permanent that will be burned to thousands or millions of disks, something that users will continue to use and install for years to come. Far from standing in opposition to unstable, it is a perfect complement, letting us share everything that's great about Debian with users for whom tracking a constantly-changing testing or unstable simply isn't an option.
I had decided well before etch was finished that it was time for me to move on from serving as release manager, but I still look forward to great things from Debian stable for lenny and releases beyond. With last weekend's release team meeting in Juelich, and the wonderful collaboration that's sure to take place this week at DebConf 7, I think we're off to a great start. The grumbling on IRC about broken packages and missing builds and uncoordinated library transitions is already in full swing for lenny -- and I'm no small contributor to that myself even now -- but we shouldn't let that blind us to what a great achievement etch has been for the Debian community, and what a great achievement lenny will be when it's released exactly on schedule next year.