Re: Debian - Release Cadence Options

On Thu, Oct 16, 2025 at 12:00:11PM -0400, Greg McPherran wrote:
>I certainly understand the stable model. However, if I may suggest 
>considering a cadence option similar to Ubuntu and Fedora that provide 
>an official release every 6 months or so.

The release cadence is basically driven by what's practical given the 
resources Debian has.  We've managed a two-year cadence pretty reliably 
for 20 years now.  It's easy to think of benefits of a faster cadence, 
but a faster cadence would also incur at least the following extra 
problems:

  * it would be more difficult to organize larger projects that need to 
    be completed in a single release cycle (e.g. the 64-bit time_t 
    transition in trixie)

  * freezes would need to be much quicker in order that developers have 
    time to do ordinary work in non-frozen periods, which would require 
    more people to fix release-critical bugs even more aggressively than 
    we already do

  * teams that are heavily involved in the release process (release, 
    archive management, installer, etc.) would have more frequent work to 
    do and would get fewer breaks

  * offering an equivalent security support period with more frequent 
    stable releases would multiply the work that the security team has to 
    do, since more stable releases would have to be supported at once

Canonical solves some of these problems for Ubuntu by paying more people 
to do things (although I can certainly tell you from personal experience 
that this doesn't make the resulting burnout go away).  I assume Red Hat 
does similarly for Fedora.  There are people paid to work at least some 
of the time on Debian, but it isn't really the same model and Debian's 
own resources would not stretch to very much of that on an ongoing 
basis.  So you're pretty much left with the established compromise that 
Debian's core teams have found to be sustainable over the long haul.  
I'm not sure what it would take to change that, but I doubt it would be 
any single simple change.

Regards,