Gnome developer Dave Neary blogs about Gnome 3.x development, and suggest to drop the 6 month release cycle, replacing it with a 9 month or 12 month cycle.

I hope they won’t go the Debian way of not releasing ever… :-)

I’m not really sure what the answer should be. I don’t see many benefits oft including more and more applications in the “Gnome platform”. And for Debian it is often suggested to “componentize” (see Progeny’s componentized Linux, or Eduard Bloch’s blog or even some DPL platforms from recent years.

In my opinion, there is much to gain here, since this allows us to have parts of Debian move at different speeds, too.

For example, “base” (toolchain, compilers, libc) might move at two year cycles. Server applications such as apache might want to use the same cycles, whereas the Gnome and KDE “modules” might prefer 12 month or 9 month cycles, depending on upstream.

This will probably better match our user needs: one the one hand, we want to have a stable platform for admins (i.e. not too many releases…) and on the other hand, desktop users are really keen to get the newest versions…