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Debian Freeze Process Begins
EmilEifrem writes: "Everyone and their mom will have submitted this, but woody aka testing aka Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 is entering frozen stage. Check out the announcement at DebianPlanet." The freeze process is different from previous freezes; read the announcement for details.
Yes, Debian sucks. It is the nature of operating systems to suck. However, as someone who uses both Debian and RedHat, I have to say that Debian sucks less (in terms of broken depenancies and other weirdness) that RedHat. You mention Slackware, which has no dependancies. While you may have fond memories of using such systems, there is a reason why modern distributions have all gone to including dependancies -- they really cure more headaches than they cause. Now, the BSD source-based packaging systems might work well -- I haven't tried them, but in theory they sound good.
I can only vouch for releases since 4.0, but RedHat really does seem to have a sensible numbering system. They move to a .0 release whenever they break binary compatibility and like clockwork put out .1 and .2 releases that mainly seem to be bug fix releases as opposed to containing drastically different features. If debian went to .0 for every release that broke binary compatibility they'd probably do it every release because of the longer release cycles
The apt_preferences(5) man page has details on how to achieve this.
I always get the giggles when debian freezes, because we all pretend that we're going to run stable, then in a week we get tired of it and switch back to unstable. "I'm going to not have debconf get raped by a missing perl module and uninstall half my software" we say, but then we end up having it happen anyway... Anyways, It'll be nice to upgrade my server to the new stable *cough* *hack* (who am I kidding... I run testing on my server).
RedHat goes to .0 when they break everything.
They go to .1 when they fix some of it, and .2 when they fix most of it, at which point they are prepared to screw everything up again for the next .0 release.
--
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
I run testing/unstable on my workstation, but I do /only/ run stable on my servers. Testing is not good because security patches take much longer to hit it.
Since I'm runing stable on my servers, I can simply put security.debian.org in my /etc/apt/sources.list and apt-get upgrade to automagically install all new security updates, which makes keeping my box up to date /very/ easy.
Also, I've had enough problems with unstable (and they occur in testing from time to time as well) that I know better than to apt-get upgrade to anything but stable on a box serving a web site or thousands of mail messages a day.
Jordan Bettis
``Wherever you go, there's another stupid sigfile quote.''It's very simple, if you want a system like that you can start your own project, use ANY current distribution of Free Software as your base (Debian, OpenBSD, RedHat) and try to find developers to help you make it work (or else impress us all).
Debian however is about creating stable environments which can be used anywhere but because it has an open development process, people can track stable, testing/frozen, unstable. The real interest of this story and why it deserves to be discussed on /. (apart from the managments penchant for it) is that this release of Debian is being handled by a new person with new ideas. The aim (as the link reiterates) is to bring down the release cycle time for Debian (with an ambition of a roughly 6 month cycle). We have seen the arrival of the testing distribution which is basically an automanaged version of Debian containing co-dependant sections which have been through some testing and need to be broken! We are now seeing a detailed breakdown of how this will start being frozen out into a release.
I think that aj deserves all the support in the world (and he'll be getting more and more of mine) as if he suceeds Debian could become a True Power. Debian is continually praised except for package ages and user ease. We have seen a number of Debian based distributions but each of these I feel was probably let down by the need to continually update the entire system as users could not accept an 18 month release cycle. The potential for commercial investment around Debian is huge, what company would not like to be able to base their products on the stablility of a stable Debian. If we have a 6 month Debian stable release cycle, I am certain we would see new-user Debian systems for many purposes (servers, desktops) aswell as embedded Debian and we would also see many of these bodies working actively in Debian itself to improve the base even more in each of those 6 months.
Debian best embodies the ethos of Free Software and it's development model is an example of how impressive open development is. How many people on /. would not move Linux production systems to Debian if it had a 6 month release cycle (without effecting stability)? If we want Linux to take power, we need to support Linux, but that is a hard task at present. When you are asked "which Linux should I try" you make one of the biggest impacts to Linux development you can (unless you actively participate in a project), the answer at present is far from easy. We should be able to say Debian and then you can decide if you need something else simply because Debian is openly developed and stable. Can anyone propose some alternative Linux distro we should support? If the philosophy of Free Software is held widely by it's knowledgable users then we should all be choosing our OS as a sign of support. aj is trying to help the world. How about we help aswell? I know I will!
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
The version of apt in the testing branch has this functionality. I'm currently running testing, with a few packages from unstable installed. I have apt setup to default to using testing, but it will grab packages from unstable if I explicitly tell it to, and correctly resolve all the dependancies.
Debian rocks :>
-- Agthorr