I'm glad I'm not a debian-devel subscriber right now. They tell me the flamewar is quite massive, and the discussion has diverted into Ubuntu and Cabal bashing here and there.

Yesterday I came quite late into office, after a nice visit to the hospital, and the first thing I got in my hands was a printed copy of Vorlon's announcement from Sergio. I was quite impressed by what I found out, and both of us agreed that this is a very positive step forward for the Sarge release and Debian's release process in general.

I understand that some people are not happy about this because the architectures they work on won't be part of etch, but let's face it: the amount of work and maintenance required to make those architectures part of a Stable release, with all the implications that has in Debian, was way too high for the very small percent of users these architectures have. It would be interesting to find out how many of the mips box using Debian out there are actually using Woody. Yeah, it's easy to say this because I have no boxes using any of these ports and I don't work on any of these ports.

I do think that the small communities that live around the ARM, s390 or MIPS ports can make something usable out of the scc archive. Not being part of etch is not the end of those ports, it's just a matter of changing how things work. Debian hasn't scaled too well in some areas for some time, and this proposal is an aggressive way of addressing the problems that have held a new stable release for way too much time.

I, for one, welcome this very much needed proposal. I think it clears the future for Debian, which wasn't too defined lately. I hope the release team and vorlon in particular will be able to go through the Planet and debian-devel storms with their morale and will to contribute their free time more or less intact. I support you guys. :)