Debian Freeze Process Update

snotty6969 writes: "Freeze Update. Anthony Towns sent in an updated report about the Woody freeze process. We're almost into the last week for uploads of base packages. If there are outstanding bugs you'd like to see fixed, provide patches or upload now. We are also getting into the last days for ensuring that standard and task packages get included in the Woody release. At the moment it looks like a lot of packages will be removed from Woody. Among these are a whole bunch of commonly used programs like gpm, Mutt, CVS, Procmail, Apache and Mozilla. People who can fix bugs in these packages and care about them are encouraged to send in patches or upload fixed packages using Anthony's unofficial NMU guidelines."

Comments

Re:Not fantastic

[compwizrd]

This is their way of forcing the bugs to be fixed, is all, yes.

Who needs attribution, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

This submission was lifted verbatim from the most recent Debian Weekly News. I just felt someone should point this out, since the submitter didn't seem to consider it worth mentioning.

No need for alarm...

[HoserHead]

...this, as others have mentioned, is more of a wake-up call to maintainers than anything. Apache _will_ ship with Debian 3.0, because maintainers will make it as bug-free as possible, because they care about it. gpm has already been fixed of most (all?) of its bugs. Similarly, we can expect all of the other major packages to be fixed in the next couple of days.

Don't worry, people. The packages you care about will be in Debian 3.0. (Including mpg321!) We'll make sure of it. :)

Re:No need for alarm...

[Daniel]

Indeed, I seem to recall that in past releases, little unimportant packages like libc6, boot-floppies, and dpkg were among the ones being "targeted for removal if you don't fix them" :)

(feel free to correct me if my memory misfired)

Daniel

Re:What the hell is going on?

[Anonymous Coward]

>> I have yet to see any significant breakage in testing or even significant breakage in unstable that would have survived over 48 hours.

>It's okay for something to be broken for 48 hours?

You don't need to dist-upgrade every day. I personally wasn't hit by this bug even though I use unstable; I get the new packages when I need them.

>>This is all unlike RedHat users, who have to wait for several months to get a new revision of their distro; we get all the new good stuff inside a week or two from upstream release, sometimes in a couple of days, like the Mozilla 0.9.6 which was made available in unstable just yesterday.

>That's unstable, not testing. It won't be in testing for a long, long time.

So first you say unstable is bad because it's sometimes broken and then testing is bad because it's a bit late? You can't have your argument both ways :)

The time for a package to get into testing is about two weeks. Do you get stable upgrades for a RedHat system after two weeks? For all my uses at least, the current Debian system of releasing is perfect.

>Debian has a hell of a lot of work to do before it's ever going to be taken seriously. Debian is about the last thing to be supported by any Linux company, because you're either dealing with an installation that's two years outdated, or with users who haven't enough common sense not to be running a ticking timebomb of a chaotic workstation.

My company is using Debian. Why? Because the software is upgradable and maintainable due to the standards that force Debian packages to be correct. The easiness of customization is better than anything I've seen. And anyone I know who has actually tried Debian in such an environment has agreed with me on that. People are only using RedHat because much of the same reasons people are using Windows...

Re:Debian's standard of quality

[CentrX]

There's always been a version of mozilla in there, it's just been M18 the whole time. I'm not amazed that mozilla 0.9.x got in, because that's something that I'm sure a lot of people have been saying is important, so it's been looked at more closely.