Debian Testing Tree Goes Online

A few people noted that Debian has brought the 'Testing' Tree on-line. So now we have Stable (currently potato) for production boxes, Testing (woody) for settling things down before an eventual release, and a new unstable tree for those of us who'd just rather things randomly break. Here's a bit more info if you're curious.

Comments

Randomly break?

[Baloo Ursidae]

and a new unstable tree for those of us who'd just rather things randomly break.

Although if you like things to just randomly break, why aren't you using Windows?

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Re:respectable

[blakestah]

I think its great what they're doing. But, Isn't debian mostly alpha stuff. I mean it's always in the testing phases so what's the real point here?


Try running potato - the stable distro.

Woody is unstable. If you apt-get upgrade your woody regularly you will occasionally have some fun manual work to do. Like that upgrade last week that broke perl and thus debconf.

But the debian releases are in general more stable and MUCH MUCH easier to maintain than any RPM based distro. The packaging is just clean.

The reason the packaging is clean is simple. There are 644 Debian packagers, most of them system administrators running Debian for a living. It is human nature to be lazy, so these administrators each do their job on Debian so that their day jobs are easy and they can play quake while RedHat, Mandrake, and SuSE admins are resolving package dependencies and compiling unsupported packages from tarballs.

Now where is that Dubya patch for Quake again ...

Re:random things breaking not my experience

[jguthrie]

chasec wrote:

I used Debian woody for a while, but apt once installed perl-5.6, and it totally screwed up the dpkg config system. I had to go back to Mandrake (though I don't particularly like 7.2). Has anyone else had a problem with the perl 5.6 package? Is it fixed yet?

In order to understand the problem, you have to understand how Debian does (or at least "did") user-specific stuff. For anything where multiple versions were available, and for which end users might want to select which one to actually use, they set up links in /etc/alternatives and then another link in whichever directory is appropriate, usually /usr/bin or /usr/sbin for binaries.

Since there are multiple versions of perl interpreter out there, and since users might want to select between them, perl was done in this way so you might have /usr/bin/perl linked to /etc/alternatives/perl which would then be linked to /usr/bin/perl-5.005 or some such.

Well, the perl5.6 package deleted the link /usr/bin/perl and didn't replace it with anything. Since many of the install scripts use perl, this started breaking stuff during the upgrade that first included perl5.6. It took me a while, but once I noticed that install scripts were failing with "file not found" errors, I took a quick look and was able to verify both that the broken programs were perl scripts and that /usr/bin/perl was nowhere to be found.

So, I immediately created the symbolic link between /usr/bin/perl and /etc/alternatives/perl and re-ran apt, which fixed everything whose install was broken. Problem solved, and no reinstalling.

Since then, it appears that more recent versions of the perl5.6 package copy the actual perl binary into /usr/bin/perl (at least on the computer I use most, /usr/bin/perl and /usr/bin/perl5.6.0 have the same size and MD5 hash) so the problem does appear to have been fixed. However, I'm seeing some wierdness in woody that may be associated with the recent switch to package pools. (From what I understand, package pools allow files to move from "unstable" into "testing" without massive quantities of copying any time someone makes a change. This is a more significant development than a "testing" release, in my opinion.)

unstable not an overall situation

[hawk]

It's not that unstable is generally unstable, but that occasionally it will bite you--bad. I found this to be about twice a year. But losing my system for most of a day while I repaired it, or used another machine to keep up on mailing lists to figure out *how* to repair it, got to be too much. I used stable through about 1.1 (bo? it's been a while). After that, the bites got to be too much.

THis new "testing" branch would have solved, I believe, all of the "gotchas" I faced (but probably wouldn't have caught the change in how fvwm functioned; I was apparently the first to file the bug/change, and I think I fought it for more than two week).

hawk

Re:nice to hear

[amccall]

I believe that's the major reason why they are doing this - to help keep the "stable" tree in date, such that the distro never gets as far behind as it does in the past.

If you like debian, but want to stay with the times, you could also try something like Storm Linux which is based on Debian, but uses newer snap shot releases.

(Just a Storm/Debian user singing some praises). Good luck Debian team, and keep up those nice releases!

APT The Holy Light

[iomud]

Interesting that now redhat and slackware fall in line with their own conjurings of APT. Debian's been doing it all along and only now do other distro's understand why people love debian. You spend more time using the applications and less time screwing with setups and configuration.

Re:APT The Holy Light

[sjames]

for example, apt-get update && apt-get upgrade broke my X server for 1 week when woody changed from 3.3.6 to 4.02RC-3..that sucked.

Actually, that's not APT's fault at all. Woody is the UNSTABLE tree. Things do break within Woody. That will be less of a problem now that Woody is moving to the Testing tree, but it can still happen. Potato (stable) is the tree where you should expect things NOT to break like that. I run Potato on production boxes, and find that it really doesn't break.

If not breaking is more important than having the very latest bleeding edge stuff, switch to Potato and add the security.debian.org updates to sources. If you want a mostly stable system but NEED the latest and greatest something, you can allways go with potato and attempt a 'Potato and a half' config with a few packages from Woody (or compile from source to minimize Woody dependancies).

Re:this makes sense only if downgrading was easier

[Chris Pimlott]

Well, there's a half solution. Switch "testing" for "woody" in your /etc/apt/sources.list and update. This won't downgrade packages to the testing versions but eventually the testing versions will "catch up with" and overtake the woody ones and you'll be getting only testing updates from then on.

As to what to do with the woody packages you have that are later then the testing versions... well, after you do the above change you could try manually doing "apt-get install " and see what happens. It might do what you want, or it might just say "already have a later version". Never had an instance to try it but it's worth a shot.

Some suggestions for next time something breaks...

[TobyWong]

Call me crazy, but when something breaks on my system, I try to fix it rather than switching distros.

How many times do you read on slashdot "oh yeah I couldn't install the matrix windomaker theme .rpm so I switched to mandrake/debian/otherdistro"

HUH?????

When you get a smudge on your windshield do you trade your car in for a new one?

Help is available!

Next time something breaks, look for a mailing list for that app and search the archives, try jumping on irc.debian.org #debian, do a web search... nine times out of ten there are other people experiencing the same problem who are more than willing to help.

Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.

It's good to see the tree up

[Chuck Flynn]

It's good to see Debian got the tree up in time for Christmas. Soon we'll be decking the halls with boughs of Woody.

Testing is auto-generated

[divec]

Basically, the testing distribution is "maintained" by an automatic script, which contains all packages which have been in the unstable (i.e. development) distribution for two weeks without a release critical bug being filed, subject to satisfying package dependencies. The idea is that testing might be buggy, but should be up-to-date and not completely broken. See here for more detail and precision.