Lee Revell wrote:
On Tue, 2006-03-21 at 11:41 +0000, tim hall wrote:
My reasoning behind this point/question is that studios and production
environments are likely to want to run 'stable' distros and Debian is
always going to ship with at least year old software, whether anyone
thinks it's a good idea or not. I would welcome any suggestions as to
a better way of dealing with these issues as I foresee a greater need
for this kind of support and I would like to be able to point users to
a better source of information when these queries come up, which is
likely to become more frequent as Linux Audio gains production
stability.
If you want to run old software but your hardware requires the latest
bug fixes, I don't see any good solution, other than for the distro to
back port bug fixes and new drivers, which Debian/DeMuDi don't seem to
be doing.
Right.
If a production environment wants to use a 2-year old kernel they had
better be willing to use 2-year old hardware if they need full driver
support.
OK, I understand your point.
This is the work that the DeMuDi stable maintenance 'team' *er, cough*
should be doing. We're not off the starting blocks yet, as is probably
obvious, mostly due to lack of human resources. As A/DeMuDi itself only
has one full-time developer, Free Ekanayaka, the focus is necessarily
always on the next release rather than maintaining old or current
releases. I'm trying to figure out a game plan for maintaining future
stable releases. The ideal is that we don't have to bother bleeding-edge
devs with technical questions, no guarantees on that one!
I would request that the developers on this list be a little more
patient with people running old versions of their software. By all means
explain that you don't have time to deal with such enquiries, we will
respect that. This is a 'users' list and not everyone is testing the
latest releases, some people are running stable production environments
with software up to two years old - There are some good reasons for
taking this approach and as the software becomes more stable we will
have more users coming in who are sticking to the stable versions.
I guess the support needs to come from people who are already working in
such environments, so I'm hoping this will grow organically. However, I
don't see any harm in planting a few seeds. ;)
Thanks for your reply, that has given me some useful focus.
cheers,
tim hall
