Debian Lays Out Freeze Plans For Woody

impaler writes: "Looks like Woody is frozen. LWN has a message from the Woody release manager, saying it is frozen. So, I guess it is finally frozen. Hopeful in less than a year Debian 2.3/3.0 will be out. Yay. Well, really lots of yay. Nice gui installer(even though I'm fine with the text one) and automatic hardware detection(something I like...especially when installing Debian on a box you know almost nothing about its hardware i.e. at an installfest)." And it looks like the Debian Release Manager has absolutely, positively staked his life on releasing Woody no later than July 8, 2001, so we can set our clocks now and hold him to his sworn word.

Comments

Release date NOT stated

[dap24]

It hardly looks like the Debian Release Manager "has absolutely, positively staked his life on releasing Woody no later than July 8, 2001" after viewing the following statements in the message (too lazy to read it?):

"So, a theoretical (and overly optimistic) timeline: [timeline follows]"

"Now, those dates are obviously not realistic: it's questionable whether there'll even be alpha-quality i386 boot-floppies by the end of this month; ..."

"Let me note that again for anyone from the press that might be reading:

THOSE DATES ARE NOT REALISTIC!
[0]"

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I'm not stoned, I just chugged a pack of fUN dIP!

Re:yet another gui install ??

[ebenson]

I have NO idea how this GUI installer rumor came about, it is blatently false. Woody will use the same boot floppies as potato does, and the debian installer project will also have a nearly identical UI (the text based curses menu like the current boot-floppies use).

If slashdot (or the submitter) had bothered to actually read Anthony's message in its entirety they would have seen that 1) woody is not frozen yet. and 2) that there is no mention whatsoever of a GUI installer. what Anthony DOES mention is better packaging of GUI software such as KDE/GNOME type programs.

here is a quote from the actual message where this silly rumor must have come from:

Third, I'd really like to see Debian include some of the nice "desktopy" stuff that's coming out for Linux these days: office software, DVD players, games, KDE, Gnome, Mozilla and so on. I'd like to see the installer cope nicely with the hardware that goes with it, video cards and sound cards and TV cards and whatever.


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"staked his life"

[norton_I]

What part of the "THESE DATES ARE NOT REALISTIC" enclosed in blink tags did you not understand?

He didn't stake a beer on that date, much less his life.

Woody is NOT frozen

[lazarusL]

How to say this without sounding like a troll?

Woody is most definitely NOT frozen, and /. shouldn't proclaim lies as headlines.

GUI INSTALLER?

[tcd004]

Real geeks install their software by hand!

Clench a magnetized needle, (which you must magnetize yourself) between your thumb and forefinger, and carefull magna-etch the data of your program onto the surface of your hard drive platter. Don't leave any fingerprints on the platter, and for god's sake, leave your static electricy elsewhere! Use of microscopes is generally frowned upon. Come on! Like you can't feel your way through those sectors!

Bunch a crybabies.

tcd004
The guts of the PENTIUM 4!
Stockphotos

Re:GUI INSTALLER?

[DeadMeat (TM)]

Magnetized needles? Ha! You don't know how good you've got it.

You kids today complain about having to download the CD image over a 56kpbs modem connection. Why, when I was a kid, we dreamed of 2400 baud modems. "Some day, far in the future, you might live to see 300 baud modems," our teachers told us. Sure, we had modems then, but they were only 1/2 bit per second (2 seconds per click/beep), so it was usually just easier to pick up the phone line and say "0, 1, 0, 0, 1 . . ." And plus you didn't have to worry about line noise that way, which ate up 3/4 of the bits we sent.

Plus, we didn't have those new-fangled CD images either. We just had disks that were 3 feet by 3 feet and only stored 16 bytes of data. And you usually lost 14 of those from bad sectors. And our drives couldn't do any of that fancy writing stuff -- oh no. We had to shift the magnetic bits around ourselves. At least that made downloading disk images easy, because the magnetic bits were so big you could flip them like DIP switches, and you only had to speak 128 0's or 1's over the phone.

And a GUI installer? The monitors we had just had 2 pixels, and each pixel was 6 inches wide, because that was the smallest they could make them. We didn't have any fancy GUI installers or those shoot-em-up games, 'cause we only had a 2x1 resolution. But we had "Guess Which Of The Pixels Is Going To Light Up Next", which is still a better game than all the new FPSes combined.

And we had to walk 2000 miles to the closest computer store to buy it, because there was only one of those back then. And it was in the desert. We had to walk uphills both ways, too.

Is it really frozen?

[Liam]

Did anyone actually read the referenced message? It doesn't sound to me like it's frozen - for each of the three parts (base system, boot floppies and standard packages, optional packages), testing comes first, then that part will be frozen.

Is this a correct? If so, it seems like a big difference from being frozen.

And a lot better than the previous practice, I might add.

Freeze HOWTO from the guy who gave you testing

[bfree]

Since Woody became testing the nature of a freeze has changed. Now instead of freezing a codebase and trying to test it til it's stable, there is a start point already present (anything that has made it into testing). To quote:

So, what I've been thinking, and what I'm (belatedly) proposing, is to roughly invert the test cycles and the freeze itself, so that instead of freezing everything then doing test cycles to work out where we're at, we instead choose some part of Debian to test, test it, and, if it's good enough, freeze it. Once everything's successfully tested and frozen, we release.

The three main test cycles I think we'll need are as follows:

1. The base system
2. Boot-floppies, standard packages and tasks
3. Optional and extra packages

This is a proposal as to how Debian should move from where it is now to a released woody and as the following quote shows it's about time to

Now, I've screwed up a bit here, because I haven't taken the time to properly discuss how we're going to do the freeze.

I have to say I think that the testing distro is going to do wonders for Debian and the problems it has had (old packages in stable). A release with Kernel 2.4, X4, Kde2, mozilla1.0 in 2001 would stand up respectebly to anything anyone else has done to date, and I'll take a Debian release over a commercial release any-day (a la mozilla V nutscrape 0.6!=6.0, but 1.0~=6.1)

Re:Automatic hardware detection!

[volsung]

Kudzu

No, woody is *not* frozen

[joey]

The number of innacuracies in this article is very high.

Woody is NOT frozen. We have a timeline, which calls for a freeze beginning in April. The timeline is plastered with "THOSE DATES ARE NOT REALISTIC!" warnings.

Woody may or may not include hardware autodetection, but the code's not there yet. The next-generation debian installer project (which I lead) WILL have hardware autodetection, but it will not be a supported installation method for woody.

Woody will NOT have a GUI installer. What fever dreams prompted impaler to write that, we will never know.
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Re:Automatic hardware detection!

[Fluffy the Cat]

Progeny already have a Debian based system with a very nice hardware autodetection system. The beta versions have been able to pick up everything on the various pieces of hardware I've tested it on. They also have a very cool tool for installing multiple systems with the same setup without having to do each one by hand - install on one, set up a DHCP server or a file containing MAC addresses and networking information, create floppies for every other machine, boot them all, come back and find that they've installed everything and configured themselves in the same way as the first machine.

Automatic hardware detection!

[evil_one]

One of the marks of a mature OS. I'm glad to hear that a major linux distro has it... Corel did a good job on my P75, but it's all stock hardware.
What REALLY impressed me was the QNX demo. It installed on my system, automatically loaded drivers for my mouse, cdroms, etc, then it automatically set up their mini-X on my Voodoo 3 at 1024x768 (NO MODELINES!!! Woohoo!) and what REALLY knocked my socks off - It even set up my printer, I was able to print Sluggy Freelance on my Epson Colour 740 by simply hitting the print button! All this in 15 minutes!
Anyway, automatic hardware detection will rawk. I've got about 15 different computers a month that get debian installed on them. (Or re-installed, due to hardware failures, etc.)
I think that the Debian guys deserve a big slashdot hug.
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