This is the current philosophy behind Debian's release process. Release only when everything is ready, meaning that all the infrastructure is in place, and the number of release critical bugs is zero.
Pros:
- Results in releases of high quality (because we always sacrifice promptness instead).
- Releasing is important for our development process.
- Compared with releases that are staggered or subdivided, big monolithic releases are easier to support.
- Compared with more frequent release schedules, an infrequent release schedule reduces the number of releases that have to be supported. Thus, the releases we do make are supported better. An infrequent release schedule also make it reasonable for us not to support skip-upgrades, which simplifies package maintenance.
Cons:
- This worked better when Debian was small. The time between releases has been steadily increasing over the past several releases using this method. The time between releases has driven people to use sid or another distribution.
See ReleaseProposals for alternatives.