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Neither Stable Nor Unstable: A Midrange Debian?
truefluke writes: "This was forwarded to me, from a friend who is a very loyal Debian supporter, with the cool news that Debian could become 'more up to date more often'. This news appeared here on the
Debian news source. A good idea, and prob incentive for more folks to try out Debian without resorting to the old saw of 'too old / too slow.'" Debian developer Anthony Towns says in the list posting mentioned there that "[t]his is a (mostly finished) project that will allow us to test out distribution by making it "sludgey" rather than frozen[.]" Sounds like the same logic behind the Caldera "Technology Preview" and Red Hat's Rawhide -- give people more of what they want of The Bleeding Edge, without getting reckless with the official release.
`slushy' rather than `Sludgey' would make sense to me.. Sludge is nasty s**t. Slush is a mixture of ice and water..
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Ski-U-Mah!
You're going to use maybe 10% of that ISO you're downloading.
Our mirror network, on the other hand, can deal with anything you're likely to throw at it.
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see shy jo
First of all, I'd like to once again offer translation for people who do not use debian...
Stable: Its too old to bother playing with so it won't be changing much.
I've been flamed and moderated down for mentioning this in the past but I actualy like this about Debian. It is true, a system is stable if it isn't changing much. Usualy in free software it isn't changing much becuase there isn't anything to fix, and its old enough that no one is really developing for it anyway. To proprietary distro's stable means it won't crash. But whats the use of getting the latest 4.0 release on disk when the day after you buy it a problem arises and you have to get 4.01? That isn't stable. And honestly its only the old software that no one is developing for that you can assume such stability from.
Unstable: We aren't sure where this is going yet but its the latest stuff.
Unfortunately unstable in the past has had things break. Like perl, libc, and bash. Things that darn near ruined a system and would leave to a re-install. Honestly I don't know how the bad versions got in the distro because the problems were sooo glaring and obvious that I can't assume that they were tested at all.
I've often brought up that there should be a little lag time to filter out such destructive incompetance. The response was "no, let the user beware." Really, all it would take is people running the 'incoming' distro to have things happen the way they are proposed to with the testing. But its just an automatic move from incoming to unstable, no QA whatsoever and from what they say there never will be. So this is the next most logical choice.
And just because lots of people talk about it, here is my take on the definition of Free...
Free: Doesn't threaten our guild socialism.
I personaly would like them to use 'nonthreatening' and 'threatening' instead of 'free' and 'nonfree'. It would simply be a lot more understandable. But wouldn't help keep the aloof holier-than-thou status that really attracts debian developers.
All in all if you learn their quirks in vocabulary its the best easiest funnest distro out there. And they could use your help incorporating such cool things as lothar, etc...
Open source does guarantee that bugs will be found rather than left concealed, and that they can be fixed straightforwardly. It doesn't in any sense keep them from being made or released in the first place.
The fact of the matter is that some open-source and free-software projects have a vastly better track record in terms of stability (which includes security) than some others.
This is really nice. This basically gives a 'QA' release of stable, etc, before it's really stable. woody is like a full fledged development environment, aka, things change at anyone whim. Once ready, things go into a 'QA' stage. This is a very good and tried and proven method for testing of software for stable release.
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
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"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
I've had long discussions with BSD people about what the various designations used by FreeBSD really mean. This is the what I've come to understand:
FreeBSD ~ Debian
current ~ unstable
stable ~ stable
release ~ "we stuck it on a CD"
The releases are really just snapshots of one of the other branches of FreeBSD -- basically the source tree is frozen in time and pressed onto a CD-ROM. Anyone installing from a release is urged to follow "stable" which tracks fixs to the distribution. So "release"s are really just packaged versions of the other trees, provided for convenience on CD-ROM.
Thus, it seems to me that FreeBSD doesn't really have three branches.
> hmmm..., when will the world learn?
Ick. BSD elitism.
--Lenny
I like that nobody else has to make that decision for you. I personally run unstable almost all of the time, and it works great for me, but my secretary runs stable.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
You grab a certian mail out of the middle of a thread. And then say, "Look what they are going to do!" That is wrong! Here is the end of the mail: "So there you have it. It's coded. It works. It serves a useful purpose. I think we should use it." It does NOT say it's official policy or procedure does it?
If it's not made painfully obvious that we're dealing with two different distributions, people will start generalizing. One can forsee everything from "Debian is not user friendly" to "Debian is unstable" to "Linux suXX0rz! W1ND0ZE r001z!" Okay. I'm going overboard at the end there, but I hope my point is made.
RedHat has managed to handle this well with their RawHide release, Mandrake with its Cooker, etc etc... I don't forsee any major obstacles to Debian giving "the people what they want" with what they've described as their "sludgey" release. As long as they're kept separate, especially such that Debian doesn't sacrifice its established position with its reliable frozen releases, it's a good thing. Hell... it might tip me over the edge into installing Debian around here...
--- [DrPsycho] Coping with reality since 1975.
-DrPsycho - Coping with reality since 1975
Why not set up an el-cheapo PC running Win as a gateway box, and network your Linux machine through it. Damned counterintuitive, since it works so well the OTHER WAY AROUND (hell... forget Win-->Linux Gateway, just install Linux everywher), but at least that way you'll be able to use one of those "free access" offers.
Heh. Gets around those annoying banners too! :^)
--- [DrPsycho] Coping with reality since 1975.
-DrPsycho - Coping with reality since 1975
Unstable: Has some glaring configuration errors, is the copy I'm currently working on and is in no way guaranteed to compile.
Release: Not all features implemented, but the glaring bugs have been fixed. Will compile, has an updated readme and gets it's very own release number.
Stable: 1.0 or better. No new features added since the 1.0 release, just some minor bugfixes implemented due to other people's configurations or updated libs.
I know that these are not necessarily everyone's definitions, but they work for me.
~Hammy
"You fargin' bastiches..."
To handle dependencies.
If you update something and it loads you a new version of sopme shared library, it could hose other packages. And that *really* sucks.
By living on "unstable" releases, you can experience this first hand. And for some reason, it only happens the day before you really need to get some code written...
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bukra fil mish mish
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Monitor the Web, or Track your site!
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
Still supressing them memory of GNOME 1.0?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I tend to think that plenty of people would be willing to test unstable as well. Though, might it be kind of cool to allow changes to linux to be broken up into "patches" until they are incorporated into the next release. This would give people who want the latest and greatest a chance to get it without a full release or cd image. We could even allow the "patch" to be installed and save the original file contents elsewhere in case the user decides what they just installed was too unstable for their use. This way they can revert to the files they had before the "patch" was put in place.
I'm only using the word patch here for lack of a better word. There could be different types of things here...patches, add-ons, etc. I think it'd be cool though to install new software in its various stages and be able to uninstall it easily with a script.
This sort of thing may exist already and I may just not be aware of it.
Is this sort of release really neccessary? While I'm not currently running Woody(unstable now) when slink and potato were unstable, I ran those w/ only minor glitches, mostly in the package management, where something would require another package that no longer exists, but this was easily remedied by forcing the install and it almost always worked. Debian's unstable always seemed about 10 times more stable than some *ahem* officially released commercial products... The nice thing about debian is the apt utility. If you want a "sludgey" release, just don't update every day, just once a week perhaps from the unstable tree. It won't change much and most of the changes will be improvements. A new tree just seems like it will cause more work for the Debian people who(no offense) tend to move a little slowly already.
AFAIK, the [stable|unstable] does not refer to the state of the software but to the packaging that the maintainers do. Packaging is not trivial and sometimes people screw up[0]. The release cycle covers getting nifty new stuff and newer versions of traditional stuff and making sure that the packaging is not broken. At last count (right now, in fact), Potato covered 4402 packages, so it took a while.
[0] E.g.: Package foo depends on libBar being exactly v1.01, when in fact v1.01 or better will do. I've seen it, but rarely.
It really isn't that tough to find, Here's a list of the debian ISO servers.
--
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
There are plenty of people out there who are hard core Debian developers, or are simply interested in seeing the latest and greatest before anyone else. These people, although a smaller group than those interested in running a testing build, will be willing to run unstable. It's all part of the geometric series of the number of people using any given piece of code, as in this example from a commercial company:
A new class: 1 person, the developer
Added to internal build: 100 people, the other developers
Alpha given to interested customers: 1000 people
Beta with wide distribution: 10,000 people
Release: 100,000 people, everyone
With debian, the series was getting inverted. The unstable branch was stable enough and had enough new features that it was a better choice than the stable branch. This is not what you want unstable to be used for. In order to restore the "normal" order the Debian folks decided to make a "good enough" version that is suitable for many people to use. Sounds like a sensible idea to me.
Walt
Who needs a bloody ISO? Just grab http://http.us.debian.org/debian/dists/(pick one)/
/main/disks-i386/current/image-1.44. Debian does require a bit of fiddling to install without a CD, but I actually like it better that way. As for wget + proxy,
Keep it on a spare partition if you can manage the space, and get rescue.bin and root.bin from the
export http_proxy = (proxy name)
wget --proxy=on [--proxy-user=user --proxy-pass=pass] -r (url)
I've never understood why they do releases anyways. It is mostly a compilation of other peoples' software, so why not just test each indivitiual piece, along with the packages that it depends on, and if it's stable enough for public consumption, put it in the stable directory?
To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three persons, two of them absent.
Really. I hardly ever have actual problems. In fact I wish it were *more* unsatble so that I could get upgrades of all the new actual development versions of various software like the kernel and friends. Personally having access to things like the newest lynx code in official .deb form wold be a plus. Maybe even the development versions of various GNOME apps and it's core code. Or how about updating the Xfree stuff every week like they have for the WINE code.
Respond to s
Founder's Camp
Founder's Camp
News for non-Nerds. Stuff that matters.
-current
-release
-stable
hmmm..., when will the world learn?
How about "`slushy' rather than frozen".
I noticed, when I read the thread originally, that there is some concern that this would take testers away from unstable. But I did not notice the counter-argument (which I happen to fall into). I'd love (really) to test more, except unstable is too unstable. Buggy I can handle, but not working isn't cool. I think this testing dist. would brin MORE testers in from stable.
Just my opinion, I've emailed my support and opinion, perhaps others should send their support for the idea to debian-devel.
I think this is an awesome idea, and I really hope it is formally implemented.
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M
of open source is, that it is marked as "stable" when and only when it is really stable (and not when marketing has decided to ship the product), and yet you can still have your bleeding edge program when you like it. But dividing this into three different states is likely to confuse most people. It is better done if you obey the rule: "release often" (Eric Raymond). During testing phase you will find out which of these "unstable" releases are just "stable enough" to be used (that is, it is in the same state as most commercial software...). In Linux mailing lists, you'll see sometimes postings like "2.3.XX" is a stable version, use it if you really, really need feature YY". I think debian should use the same rulings. Just produce more developer releases, and if things turn out to be good enough, tell everyone about it (with a few warnings left). Its is better to be more specific: either, it is stable and tested and ready for the masses, or it ist bleeding edge where feature X works, feature Y is broken, and Z is useable if we have full moon. You just know what you're doing. And if you don't know, don't do it, even if it might work.
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