I’ve been wondering why is it that Debian doesn’t announce its updates and releases regularly on Distrowatch.
If you take a look at the page showing all the news posted about Debian, you’ll see that the last announcement was about 2 years ago (when Lenny was released).
During the Etch life cycle, point releases were announced up to 4.0.5 — it’s not clear what happened after that. During the Lenny development cycle, news were posted about the availability of the Beta 1 and the two RCs. But Squeeze isn’t mentioned yet — even when the official release is just a few days away, and there are already 2 RCs.
If we take a look at other distributions, they usually publish something for every release (major, minor, even Alphas). For example, Mint has more than 20 announcements during the past two years, Ubuntu has more than 30 during the same period (and yes, that’s just for the main distribution, without counting different flavors such as Kunbuntu and Xubuntu).
So here are some random questions related to this:
– Who’s responsible for getting news published in websites like Distrowatch? Would that be the publicity team?
– Is there a policy regarding the release of those news? (I ask this because of the inconsistencies of announcements over time)
– Does the Debian community care about having a strong —or at least regularly updated— presence in websites like this? If I remember correctly, during the last DebConf there were some talks about how to attract users or make the Debian project more “visible”.
Don’t get me wrong: I understand that other distributions have different policies or priorities with regard to how often they release, and comparing the news items that they produce with news about Debian is not entirely fair. But that’s not the point I’m trying to raise here.
Paul Wise
[ Editor ]
Anyone can send an email to Distrowatch announcing a release, including you :)
As far as responsibility, probably it is up to the release team and publicity team.
To ensure it happens in the future, I added a point to the release checklists:
http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/ReleaseTeam/ReleaseCheckList
http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/ReleaseTeam/PointReleaseCheckList
The publicity team discussed this and it was suggested that think the lack of recent release announcements might possibly be due to the death of one of the members of the Debian installer team.
We absolutely care about promoting Debian on community sites like Distrowatch/Freshmeat. That said, most Debian contributors are focussed on Debian development rather than promotion. If you would like to help the fledgling publicity team promote Debian, check out the publicity team wiki page, send us a mail and join the IRC channel:
http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Publicity
Hi Paul, and thanks a lot for your answer. I really appreciate your feedback on this topic. I’m also glad to see that this was added as part of the release checklist. I would be happy to help the Publicity team if they need a hand. I’m not a DD, just a regular user, and wasn’t sure if I could collaborate without being an official member of the Debian community.
