Somehow getting this from a Debian stable version to begin with doesn't make much sense to me. If I were using software where bugs could lead to death, I would hope I'd track any bugfix releases myself and retrieve them directly from the vendor as soon as they came out.
I mean, it still makes sense to give it a freeze exception so they don't ship a seriously buggy version with a stable release, but I would also hope that no doctor is relying exclusively on whatever version happens to come with a particular Debian stable release, without checking on the status of that version.
From a process perspective I'm not sure what the benefits of conservative processes are if they result in shipping an effectively unusable or dangerous product, nor indeed the point of a definition of "release critical" if releases happen anyway (with in excess of 1000 "release critical" issues).
My background is very much in commercial software rather that FOSS. Could someone explain why Debian ships something as niche as this with it in the first place? Isn't that the equivalent of Windows shipping with, say, Sage Accounting in just in case someone wants to use that?
It is not installed by default. The way it works, Debian provides you with many thousand of packages which you can install with one command. Debian makes sure that all programs and libraries work together, and that nothing is downloaded more often than necessary (by factoring out dependencies).
This approach works very well, but it has a few shortcomings, including the fact that sometimes, Debian ships a somewhat outdated version of a package, which may contain bugs. Some bug fixes, such as security updates, are pushed to users, but "non-critical" bug fixes need to wait.
[+] [-] _delirium|15 years ago|reply
I mean, it still makes sense to give it a freeze exception so they don't ship a seriously buggy version with a stable release, but I would also hope that no doctor is relying exclusively on whatever version happens to come with a particular Debian stable release, without checking on the status of that version.
[+] [-] unwind|15 years ago|reply
Here (http://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/) is a handy graph showing Debian's trends for the number of open RC bugs.
[+] [-] Tyrannosaurs|15 years ago|reply
My background is very much in commercial software rather that FOSS. Could someone explain why Debian ships something as niche as this with it in the first place? Isn't that the equivalent of Windows shipping with, say, Sage Accounting in just in case someone wants to use that?
[+] [-] aristidb|15 years ago|reply
This approach works very well, but it has a few shortcomings, including the fact that sometimes, Debian ships a somewhat outdated version of a package, which may contain bugs. Some bug fixes, such as security updates, are pushed to users, but "non-critical" bug fixes need to wait.
[+] [-] steveklabnik|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csmeder|15 years ago|reply