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Re:Why compete? by ezh · 2007-04-08 17:51 · Score: 1 · on Debian 4.0 'Etch' Released

We lost countless users to Ubuntu. Admittedly, Ubuntu drew a lot of its users from other distributions and even from Windows. But there is no reason for Debian to be simply the distribution upon which Debian-based distributions are based, we can also get new users by being more appealing.

http://www.debian.org/vote/2007/platforms/sho

Too late? by ezh · 2007-04-08 17:45 · Score: 3, Informative · on Debian 4.0 'Etch' Released

Debian has turned into a political zoo of OSS dinosaurs, who are too big and too ancient. They spend lots of time arguing over political issues and raise barrier too high for hew developers.

During Debian Project Leader (DPL) election campaign candidates were almost in unison looking up to Ubuntu as an example on how to attract new users and developers. With Etch out and new DPL in Debian's goal can be summarized in one phrase: "Let's catch up with Ubuntu"

How Debian's brand new DPL wants to do this:

rework website
rework bugtracking system
sex up the desktop, and
encourage optional desktop releases every 6 months...

I wonder how they are going to do it... Especially the last bit :-)

Re:Sources please? by X0563511 · 2007-04-08 06:36 · Score: 1 · on Two Major Debian Releases In One Day

http://www.debian.org/ reports 4.0 as stable.

Sam and GNAA by Anonymous Coward · 2007-04-08 06:03 · Score: 1, Informative · on Two Major Debian Releases In One Day

Sam's not a GNAA member in any sense. He has commented about his trolling on planet.debian.org too. "My obvious social mistake was my Etch release stress-o-meter"

Sam and GNAA by Anonymous Coward · 2007-04-08 06:03 · Score: 1, Informative · on Two Major Debian Releases In One Day

Sam's not a GNAA member in any sense. He has commented about his trolling on planet.debian.org too. "My obvious social mistake was my Etch release stress-o-meter"

Re:You have got to be fucking kidding me by Respect_my_Authority · 2007-04-08 03:29 · Score: 2, Insightful · on Two Major Debian Releases In One Day

It's better to read the release notes first -- these notes warn about some potential SargeToEtch upgrade problems and point out a safe upgrade path.

http://www.debian.org/releases/etch/releasenotes

Re:Sources please? (Link to Debian News) by pogson · 2007-04-08 03:10 · Score: 1 · on Two Major Debian Releases In One Day

http://www.us.debian.org/News/2007/20070408/

It is too good to be true, but this is not an April Fools joke.

Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 released by Anonymous Coward · 2007-04-08 02:04 · Score: 0 · on Two Major Debian Releases In One Day

http://lists.debian.org/debian-announce/debian-ann ounce-2007/msg00002.html

Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 released by Anonymous Coward · 2007-04-08 01:43 · Score: 4, Informative · on Two Major Debian Releases In One Day

Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 released

The Debian Project is pleased to announce the official release of
Debian GNU/Linux version 4.0, codenamed "etch", after 21 months of
constant development. Debian GNU/Linux is a free operating system
which supports a total of eleven processor architectures and includes
the KDE, GNOME and Xfce desktop environments. It also features
cryptographic software and compatibility with the FHS v2.3 and
software developed for version 3.1 of the LSB.

Using a now fully integrated installation process, Debian GNU/Linux
4.0 comes with out-of-the-box support for encrypted partitions. This
release introduces a newly developed graphical frontend to the
installation system supporting scripts using composed characters and
complex languages; the installation system for Debian GNU/Linux has
now been translated to 58 languages.

Also beginning with Debian GNU/Linux 4.0, the package management
system has been improved regarding security and efficiency. Secure
APT allows the verification of the integrity of packages downloaded
from a mirror. Updated package indices won't be downloaded in their
entirety, but instead patched with smaller files containing only
differences from earlier versions.

Debian GNU/Linux runs on computers ranging from palmtops and handheld
systems to supercomputers, and on nearly everything in between. A
total of eleven architectures are supported including: Sun SPARC
(sparc), HP Alpha (alpha), Motorola/IBM PowerPC (powerpc), Intel
IA-32 (i386) and IA-64 (ia64), HP PA-RISC (hppa), MIPS (mips,
mipsel), ARM (arm), IBM S/390 (s390) and -- newly introduced with
Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 -- AMD64 and Intel EM64T (amd64).

Debian GNU/Linux can be installed from various installation media
such as DVDs, CDs, USB sticks and floppies, or from the network.
GNOME is the default desktop environment and is contained on the
first CD. The K Desktop Environment (KDE) and the Xfce desktop can be
installed through two new alternative CD images. Also newly available
with Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 are multi-arch CDs and DVDs supporting
installation of multiple architectures from a single disc.

Debian GNU/Linux can be downloaded right now via bittorent (the
recommended way), jigdo or HTTP; see for
further information. It will soon be available on DVD and CD-ROM from
numerous vendors , too.

This release includes a number of updated software packages, such as
the K Desktop Environment 3.5 (KDE), an updated version of the GNOME
desktop environment 2.14, the Xfce 4.4 desktop environment, the
GNUstep desktop 5.2, X.Org 7.1, OpenOffice.org 2.0.4a, GIMP 2.2.13,
Iceweasel (an unbranded version of Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.3), Icedove
(an unbranded version of Mozilla Thunderbird 1.5), Iceape (an
unbranded version of Mozilla Seamonkey 1.0.Cool, PostgreSQL 8.1.8,
MySQL 5.0.32, GNU Compiler Collection 4.1.1, Linux kernel version
2.6.18, Apache 2.2.3, Samba 3.0.24, Python 2.4.4 and 2.5, Perl 5.8.8,
PHP 4.4.4 and 5.2.0, Asterisk 1.2.13, and more than 18,000 other
ready to use software packages.

Upgrades to Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 from the previous release, Debian
GNU/Linux 3.1 codenamed "sarge", are automatically handled by the
aptitude package management tool for most configurations, and to a
certain degree also by the apt-get package management tool. As
always, Debian GNU/Linux systems can be upgraded quite painlessly, in
place, without any forced downtime, but it is strongly recommended to
read the release notes for possible issues. For detailed instructions
about installing and upgrading Debian GNU/Linux, please see the
release notes .
Please note that the release notes will be further improved and
translated to additional languages in the coming weeks.

ISO download: http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/4.0_r0/i386/is o-cd/

Re:Please have them... by Anonymous Coward · 2007-04-08 01:43 · Score: 0 · on Two Major Debian Releases In One Day

Call me crazy, but if I wanted up-to-date news, I would look at the News section, not the Weekly News one.

Re:Congratulations Debian! by Respect_my_Authority · 2007-04-08 00:52 · Score: 1 · on Two Major Debian Releases In One Day

If one may ask: why does it not look to you as though the DPL would have much power to change things?

It's just the general impression I got after reading a former DPL's blog note, written about a year ago.[1] It looks like the DPL needs to be a resourceful negotiator rather than a strong leader in order to push changes into debian. If he can "sell" his ideas to other developers and convince them that the kind of changes he wants to make are desirable and good for debian, then things start happening. But it will be very hard to persuade so many developers to agree on which new direction will be the best.

Take, for instance, the various proposals to improve the release methodologies for Debian.[2] I would very much like to see debian testing to become a constantly usable "rolling release" with "beta" snapshot releases (a la "DebianInstallerReleasesAreDebianReleases"). Then there could be the actual high quality stable releases just like they currently are, and unstable would stay the free playground for developers to break things and to introduce new ideas and new versions of software. But I doubt that this kind of big change in the release methodology would be possible for the DPL to push without causing major flame wars. ;)

[1] http://www.cyrius.com/journal/2006/03/09

[2] http://wiki.debian.org/ReleaseProposals

Stop nitpicking. Time to party, dude... by msauve · 2007-04-07 23:28 · Score: 1 · on Two Major Debian Releases In One Day

Some people think it's party time, anyway.

Re:Congratulations Debian! by ct1972 · 2007-04-07 23:02 · Score: 1 · on Two Major Debian Releases In One Day

A lot of votes (267) got rejected. It seems that the accents in one candidate's name caused some problems with broken mail clients and the GPG signing. That didn't, as far as I can see, affect the outcome in anyway since most developers had plenty of time to recast their vote if it was rejected, and the problem was well discussed on the debian-devel mailing list. The announcement was at http://vote.debian.org/2007/vote_001.

Re:Hmm... I can still see bugs in their tracker by cortana · 2007-04-07 22:36 · Score: 1 · on Two Major Debian Releases In One Day

That graph does not take into account the version-tracking info associated with each bug. Try http://people.debian.org/~sesse/bugscan/ instead. From that graph, you can see that etch has been less buggy than sarge for almost a month. :)

Re:Hmm... I can still see bugs in their tracker by Anonymous Coward · 2007-04-07 22:20 · Score: 5, Informative · on Two Major Debian Releases In One Day

Some explanations about how to count:

The official release-critical bug tracker[1] is still not updated to handle "versioned bug-reports". Meaning it counts _all_ open bug reports, while in reality the bug might be "closed" in the _version_ of the package in Etch but the entire bug in not closed (because it still effects Sarge and older?). So the official sources are a bit misleading.
A debian developer called "Sesse" has an updated tracker[2]. This one gives a bit better indication about the truth. Hopefully his code will be moved over to become the official version.
As also previously mentioned, Andreas "aba" Barth has his own bug tracking tool[3]. This gives a bit more information about each release-critical bug and has filtering capabilities.
All sources indicate that there are many "RC" bugs left, but using aba's tool[3] you can see that most open bug reports are security issues. Security issues will come up all the time. There is already infrastructure in place to provide security updates for the stable distribution, so there's no need to hold back the release because of these issues as they can be fixed at any time.
The few remaining issues are new bugs that has just recently surfaces and hasn't yet been analyzed. They might have a too high severity set, noone knows until they have been analyzed. This also doesn't give much reason to hold back the released, there will always be a few really new bugs that there hasn't been time to analyze yet.
All in all, having all bugs fixed looks promising, even if noone can promise that the CD-images are 100% bug-free.

[1] http://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/
[2] http://people.debian.org/~sesse/bugscan/
[3] http://bts.turmzimmer.net/details.php?bydist=etch

Regards,
fatal

Re:Hmm... I can still see bugs in their tracker by Anonymous Coward · 2007-04-07 22:20 · Score: 5, Informative · on Two Major Debian Releases In One Day

Some explanations about how to count:

The official release-critical bug tracker[1] is still not updated to handle "versioned bug-reports". Meaning it counts _all_ open bug reports, while in reality the bug might be "closed" in the _version_ of the package in Etch but the entire bug in not closed (because it still effects Sarge and older?). So the official sources are a bit misleading.
A debian developer called "Sesse" has an updated tracker[2]. This one gives a bit better indication about the truth. Hopefully his code will be moved over to become the official version.
As also previously mentioned, Andreas "aba" Barth has his own bug tracking tool[3]. This gives a bit more information about each release-critical bug and has filtering capabilities.
All sources indicate that there are many "RC" bugs left, but using aba's tool[3] you can see that most open bug reports are security issues. Security issues will come up all the time. There is already infrastructure in place to provide security updates for the stable distribution, so there's no need to hold back the release because of these issues as they can be fixed at any time.
The few remaining issues are new bugs that has just recently surfaces and hasn't yet been analyzed. They might have a too high severity set, noone knows until they have been analyzed. This also doesn't give much reason to hold back the released, there will always be a few really new bugs that there hasn't been time to analyze yet.
All in all, having all bugs fixed looks promising, even if noone can promise that the CD-images are 100% bug-free.

[1] http://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/
[2] http://people.debian.org/~sesse/bugscan/
[3] http://bts.turmzimmer.net/details.php?bydist=etch

Regards,
fatal

Re:The ISOs for Etch are already out there... by Respect_my_Authority · 2007-04-07 22:14 · Score: 1 · on Two Major Debian Releases In One Day

Download mirrors:

http://www.debian.org/mirror/mirrors_full