Trisquel 6 missed another deadline. Is this project dead?

The blocker bug is a missing icon in Ubiquity. But indeed, after that is solved the final release will emerge.

Edit to add: Ruben told us a few hours ago to do a final test on the iso you pointed out. If you find a bug you should notify him on IRC.

It needs to be LTS to LTS release at this point. Ubuntu 13.04 comes out in April and when synching version numbers, that means Trisquel 7. Trisquel 6 isn't even out yet and it is based off an Ubuntu release nearing a year old and has had 3 ISO updates (12.04, 12.04.1, 12.04.2).

I say stick with LTS releases only and backports (custom or imported from PPAs) should be in a seperate repository. If that is "extras" or "toutatis-backports" then it should happen.

Time wise you might be right. I think the benefit of skipping the STS release would be that there is more time to backport critical driver/software pieces during the points at which Rubén would have been working on STS releases. It wouldn't bring out the LTS releases sooner though. In fact by my thinking the LTS releases would come out much later. That would provide more time to polish the LTS release.

I think there are other benefits to basing a distribution only off the LTS releases. This said I don't see any of this happening. Rubén said he was actually personally in favor of this idea although the problem with it is that there are a lot of people who would jump ship either way. Frequent releases brings in new users and helps 'market' it. Although that said I think the 'market' part could still be accomplished simply by releasing STS releases based on the LTS release + backports and still have the same 'marketing' effect. Ubuntu is actually doing this now to some degree it appears (although sticking with normal STS releases too). They are just numbering it as a minor release based on 12.04 so... in other words 12.04.2 would include a newer kernel.

The difference between Ubuntu though and Trisquel I think would be there are additional components besides the kernel backported. Besides the kernel I think abrowser, hplip, libreoffice maybe (if the UI doesn't change significantly- or maybe just have a 2nd install option within the repository similar to apache and apache2), and a few other pieces. Trisquel would then call this 12.04.2 type release 6.5 so that user perception would be “new toy” and still want to try it out/draw attention.

As far as skipping 12.10 goes how would that even work? I don't think thats an option without forcing users to reinstall. I think that is a bad idea. A good distribution is going to have stability and breaking the upgrade system is a major major no-no. The only time I'd do that is if Ubuntu was going bye-bye and Trisquel needed to switch distribution bases or if there was a move to an LTS system. In any case I think Rubén had the same line of thought as me on this one and said it wasn't going to happen (skipping an STS release that is).

Usually, there is a common bug under all STS releases, that said, when you uncheck the "Source code" checkbox under "Software Sources" in order not to add the "deb-src" line when adding a new repository with add-apt-repository, nothing really changes and the apt is happily creating this annoying duplicate line which I doesn't require and I need to manually remove it everytime I'll add a new repository. Other than that, there were just small things like audio problems, wifi turns off randomly (on Realtek RTL8187, still happening to today), things not worth to mention.

Brigantia was and still is a totally different story. When I finally repaired my broken Dagda system on my main computer after 8-9 months of malfunction (kernel panic, broken chroot, no GRUB), I found out that Dadga was an unsupported system at the time and there were some missing kernel packages and I cannot properly update the system. So I decided to upgrade to Brigantia and then the nightmare began. The upgrade process went as usual, with no issues. At the end I restarted the computer as required, but when I logged into my account I was really shocked. All my desktop customizations was gone; no sound; a full KDE stack installed (WTF?!); multi-arch self-enabled (this caused that the installed packages was conflicted with itself); bunch of :i386 packages installed (when I purged these the system does not started anymore); system was "daaarrrnnn" slow (it is still slow compared to Gnome2 but thanks to a special script I wrote which automanages all my installed packages and suggest changes when some are missing or not required anymore, and maybe by cleaning the registers with gconf-cleaner, the system is now only slow during startup with the "Intel drivers"); screen flickering(3x), then gnome-panel disappears and the opengl rendering is broken (i bet this is a Intel GPU driver/Mesa bug on my Intel Ironlake integrated graphic chip because nVidia's proprietary graphic driver just works fine except there is no brightness control); nautilus crashing (suddenly, all my desktop files/folders and nautilus windows dissappears) or hides existing files (this happened just today when I created the screenshots for the bug report); a beautiful vertical red & blue lines on the screen appears whenthe graphic stack crashes and I switches between different video output modes; some weird file/folder shifting on the desktop (?!.) There are really way too much of them to write about here.

You're actually doing the similar thing I do with the difference that you're using the net-install and installs only the required packages, while I'm done the opposite of that (made a full-install, then removed all the crapware that I don't wanted). Actually you do qualify, just make sure the problems you encounter does not come from the changes you've made. Alternatively, you can test the latest ISO images within' the VirtualBox environment as I do.