Debian GNU/Linux ‘Sarge’ frozen

Wednesday, May 4th, 2005

Well, it finally happened. Debian GNU/Linux ‘Sarge’ has been frozen. This means that no new packages and no newer versions of packages will be added and that Sarge will become the new stable in a short while. The timeline is as follows:

• 3rd May: Freeze time and security support now available for testing
• 5-8th May: BSP to bring bug count down from ~85 to ~60/70
• 15th May: Debian installer finalised
• 27th May: Zarro RC boogs
• 30th May: Release

While this is nice, I see a big problem coming up. You see, a lot of people have been complaining that Woody, the current stable release, is too old. It doesn’t contain packages like X.org and Apache 2, and a lot of packages are pretty out-of-date. Personally this has never really bothered me. I run Debian as both a desktop and server distribution but use Stable on the server and Unstable on the desktop, which works out pretty well. True, some of Woody’s packages are a little out-dated like, for instance, PHP, which is only available at version 4.

The problem is, however, that Debian Sarge still doesn’t contain PHP5. This means that Debian will be unsuitable as a viable LAMP(hp) platform.

I’m not one to make predictions, and I’m also not really aware of how many users/companies are using Debian as a LAMP platform, but I predict that not including PHP5 in Sarge will cause a major drop in the usage of Debian and a major decrease of new adopters of the distribution.

I find this a sad thing because I really really like Debian. But I simply don’t have the time to compile everything from source each time a bug is discovered in PHP. Nor can I rely on third-party Debian PHP packages from different ‘vendors’.