| Debian VD launch signals changes ahead |
Feb. 02, 2009
 [Updated Feb. 3] -- Debian's long-delayed 5.0 release (aka, "Lenny") will likely launch over the Valentine's-slash-President's day weekend, five months late. A look at Lenny's new installer hints that Debian's long-cherished "when it's ready" release schedule may be headed for divorce court, though.
(Click for larger view of "Lenny," captured from Pixar Animation's Toy Story trailer)
The Debian Installer team's Otavio Salvador today released a second "release candidate" installer for Lenny. Then, Adeodato Sim� followed with news that the Release Team hopes to launch Lenny over the Valentine's Day weekend -- making it officially five months late.
Lenny was originally slated for release last September. Debian would not be Debian, however, without release delays.
Or would it?
The old Debian way
Historically, Debian's software distribution system was set up to minimize network bandwidth usage. Afterall, as one of the oldest distro's, Debian evolved during a time when bandwidth was expensive, both in time and in money.
Debian spared bandwidth by offering a two-stage installer that continued to go by the name of "bootfloppies" long after most systems no longer had floppy drives. You installed a minimalist "base" system from floppies, a USB key, or a tiny CD ISO image (typically about 14MB). Then, you rebooted into that system, and downloaded only the software you actually wished to use, along with any updates to the tiny handful of packages already installed. (You could even change "stable" to "sid" or whatever in your /etc/apt/source.list, to efficiently install a Debian branch without it's own officially maintained installer!).
Sure, other installation methods were offered (jigdo CD downloads, for instance -- again aimed at bandworth sparing) but unless you planned to install a whole mess of systems from the same CD, it was generally faster to just download the little netinstall image and throw it on a CD-RW or USB key. It was very efficient, from a network utilization point of view. Why wait hours for the whole CD to download over a 386Mbps DSL line, when you didn't have to?
The Ubuntu way
Nowadays, bandwidth is relatively cheap, and most Linux users probably have at least a 1.5Mbps connection. That means a normal 760MB CD image ought to download in about an hour -- or more like 10 minutes if you have a 10Mbps connection. Either way, it's not an onerous amount of time, since it all happens in the background anyway.
Furthermore, if you boot a CD from a live image, it runs on a RAMdisk, leaving the system's hard drive free for rapid, block-level writes. Filecopies, especially over a network, are comparatively slower, since all the file metadata (inode tables, etc.) have to be created on the fly. The last time I installed Ubuntu, I did not time it, but I doubt it took 10 minutes. Debian netinstalls of a typical desktop system are at least twice that, by my seat-of-the-pants estimate, even on a fast SATA drive, with my 6.5Mbps connection.
Fast as they are, though, live CD image blasts have one serious drawback. They're only as up-to-date as the installer, because all the files in the whole system are delivered all at once, rather than in two stages, a la bootfloppies. Use a three-month-old installer, and the first time you run the system-update tool, you're looking at downloading a CD's worth of updates, and installing them the slow, old-fashioned filecopy way. It would have been faster just to use "bootfloppies."
For that reason, Ubuntu long ago committed to six month release cycles. Furthermore, they typically deliver two or three interim updates to the Ubuntu installer, such as the one released last week.
You see where this is going, right?
A new Debian way on the way?
The Debian Lenny installer, for the first time, includes a live CD installation option. And, it works great (in my limited testing with the RC1 installer from November). But, will it still work great six or even three months from now? Or, will everyone throw up their hands, and go back to doing it the bootfloppies way?
Two-year Debian release cycles were fine as long as most people did network installs. The distro's pace-setting in-place upgrade tools meant that most people really only installed a new system from scratch once every year or two anyway. As new hardware came out, the installer would get patches, and the only time you'd run into trouble was when the stable release's kernel (and hence, the installer's) became too old to support some new hardware you had. (It's tough to do a netinstall when your NIC isn't supported -- though not impossible. The installer does support manual driver loading, so you can always try back-porting the driver, or looking around in case someone already did).
If live CD-style installations become the norm, I expect Debian users may start clamoring for much more frequent installer releases. Since the installer is a huge part of a Debian release, that in turn could spur more frequent Debian release cycles.
Another possibility might be for Debian to hang onto its venerable long release schedules. It's a volunteer effort, after all, and why risk burn-out? (OpenSSL fiasco excepted, Debian has a pretty good reputation for quality releases, most anyone would agree.)
To do that, the project would just have to come up with yet another pace-setting tool, this time for installation. For example, what about a netinstall type installer that installs in the background, as it's downloading? Or one that, when just using pre-set tasksel collections, eschewed dpkg dependency checking?
Crazy thoughts, perhaps, I don't know. I'm no Linux programmer, myself. But, I'm a big fan of netinstalls, and I'm hoping they survive, cheap bandwidth or not. There are still plenty of folks with slow connections, and I'm not sure that image-based installations are maintainable for Debian, as the project currently exists.
I am sure, though, after a decade of soaking in Debian innovation, that the community will find a solution. And, I'm sure that if the release goes to plan, this Valentine's Day weekend could be a great time for geeks everywhere to fall in love with fast-installing Debian live CD goodness -- while it lasts.
-- Henry Kingman
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