Ubuntu Dapper Drake

Hey Ron,

I'm working on Debian and Ubuntu, as we speak, in bits and pieces. It'll probably take a couple more full days worth of work (which I rarely have the luxury of, alongside support duties, bugfixing, and general day-to-day business stuff), but it is quite high on the list of priorities, and now that a few of the higher priority bugs have been fixed it should be able to hit the top of the list soon...I've got to fix PHP4 on Fedora 5, and get FastCGI working with SuExec, which is coming along pretty nicely. The really heavy lifting on new OS support has to be done in long stretches of mostly uninterrupted work (several OS reloads for testing, software builds in a virtual environment which is even slower than builds on a real system, install tests which take a long time, etc.), so OS support is the most difficult to fit into the schedule, unfortunately. It's also the most profitable work (every time a new OS is added, we make a batch of new sales all at once, so we get to eat for another couple of weeks), so it does sometimes manage to push everything else aside for a little while, due to economic factors. ;-)

Anyway, all excuses aside, I'm as enthusiastic about Ubuntu for servers as you are. From the time I've spent with them I believe Debian and Ubuntu are right up there with CentOS/RHEL (CentOS slightly moreso because yum is better than up2date). The five year lifecycle really clinches it. I can't really overstate how important a long lifecycle is.

As for users help, nothing as of yet. We'll need some folks to try it out and report bugs when it does become available and hopefully exhibit patience when things are cranky for the first couple of weeks. The heavy lifting isn't parallelizable or easily chunked off into small/easy pieces (as mentioned above, there just aren't that many such pieces in the OS support aspect of development), and small/easy pieces that do exist (figuring out what deps are provided by the OS and under what package name they appear, for example) are already done.

In other words, it'll be ready when it's ready, and I feel more than a wee bit guilty that it isn't "already ready, already". Soon!