As stated today by Clem in this blog post,After a long reflection and many discussions the decision was made to switch Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) from its current snapshot cycle to a Debian Stable package base. The transition from Update Pack 8 to Debian Jessie should be smooth and similar to a traditional UP upgrade, in sync with the upstream Jessie freeze planned for November this year.
I think a poll is necessary for the Mint team to know the percentage of LMDE users who like or dislike this possible change of course in the future.This new strategy is already very successful and not only will it make it easier for us to release 17.1 and allow us to focus more on the development side of things, it already benefited the 17 release greatly. The same strategy could be applied to LMDE by basing it on Debian Stable, essentially migrating it from a snapshot cycle to a frozen one, like in Linux Mint. The two distributions would then be more similar to each others. LMDE would gain in quality and attention to detail while requiring less maintenance. The pros and cons are being assessed at the moment. Don’t hesitate to use the section below if you want to comment on this or share your ideas with us.
So go ahead, vote and comment!
Update: the blog post comments have been closed now (28 Jul 2014, 11:05 UTC), so the place for comments is here.
And please note:
- It's in the future. The current Debian Testing will be frozen on 5 Nov 2014 and the next stable release will be sometime in 2015. So there's plenty of time to weight all pros and cons of moving to Stable.
- Don't ask for UP9 release date; I've asked Clem and he didn't give the real answer yet - and nobody else would know it. If you still want to chat on this topic, there's this thread for it.