by The temperatures are dropping, outside your window and even more so within Debian. In less than a month Debian will go into hibernation to prepare for the next stable release Debian 8 »Jessie«. The upcoming freeze leads, even more so than with other Debian releases I remember, to a flurry amongst the developers. Everybody tries to get their latest developements into sid to have a chance to see them integrated in Jessie in a couple of months.
That being said, me abstaining from this blog for a while due to time restraints does not mean, your favourite distribution is not moving forwards. Everyone watching our git repositories will know we are constantly busy improving what we already have. So what have we been doing? Besides working on a better integration of systemd into our build tools we are concentrating on two releases: for one, 2014.1 has still not materialized, even though a lot of work has already been devoted to it.
The reason for that is that at this moment, there is only one desktop environment that could undoubtedly be released as is and that is XFCE. This is due to the fact that there has been no major updates for quite some time now. On a close second rank is KDE SC, which is, despite the upcoming switch to it’s fifth iteration, in pretty good shape. Gnome has just been updating (or is still in the process of doing so) to 3.14, with some glitches to be ironed out still.
Then there is the LXDE/LXQT/Razor-Qt conglomerate. As you will know, LXDE and Razor-Qt are going together under the Qt framework to form a new desktop environment. Razor-Qt will not be released by us anymore, it is practicaly dead, while LXQT is not quite where it needs to be for a release. As LXQT 0.8 is still not released (a 0.8rc1 might be due these days), LXQT unfortunately will not make it into Jessie. We will for sure let you try out a dev-release once LXQT is worthy of it.
Another desktop environment that will definitely make it it into debian’s next release is cinnamon. And that is the second relesase I told you we were working on. Before sicution 2014.1, in a matter of days, we will bring to you a dev-release of siduction cinnamon. Longtime supporter musca has commited himself to bring cinnamon into shape for siduction and I can tell you that a lot of love went into this project. So soon you will see a rather polished dev-release bringing the cinnamon desktop to siduction. You now may hold your breath.
Hi devil, thanks for keeping us informed.
What I really don’t get is the siduction release policy. XFCE could be released but has to wait because the others aren’t (I don’t use XFCE, so this is not a fan statement)? The same goes for whatever DE.
This critique of release policy is not a question of taste. It’s a conclusion which takes in account manpower, time restraints during build and mainly the nature of sid. Instead of releasing whatever is ready and giving people something up to date they can use to install, people use outdated ISOs and are forced to dist-upgrade more or less the whole package list. Now that you/we have this wonderfull addpkg script it becomes easier to add other DEs to an instlallation. So there is (and there was) no need to have each flavour ad hand with each release. This problem grows with each added DE. And there is one more, may be inofficial DE you don’t mention: siduction-xorg/fluxbox/basic or whatever it get’s called.
And releases need a common artwork! Really? What is true for the DEs is true for the artwork. As I see it the release policy is siduction’s own worst enemy. That’s not a question of right or wrong but of observance of the past and being good at arithmetic.
I don’t want to leave it at this, but like to add: siduction is a wonderfull(plugin-) distribution. The forum is a very helpfull place where many people try to solve whatever problem comes up. It works, it’s fine, I use it, I like it. That’s why I’am criticizing it.
michaa7