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Debian Woody Nearing Release
willybur submits word of this Debian Planet story on the upcoming release of its next stable version. The article says: "According to Anthony Towns (our beloved Release Manager), woody is nearing release. All but three RC base bugs are fixed now, and the bugsquashing party is working through the RC bugs in standard. It's not all good news though.
The bad news is that this means we're probably releasing soon, and that of the hundreds of less important packages with RC bugs (eg, bugzilla, craft, crossfire-{client,server}, epic4, fvwm95, gmc, gnome-admin, intuitively, kdepim, moon-lander, tkdesk, wine, and xosview) will be getting randomly ripped out of testing ... Check the stuff that's important to you and get it fixed before it's too late." Says willybur:
"See the announcement on debian-devel-announce."
Ive been waiting for this, hopefully going to convert when i can get some Woody :D
Of all the Linux distributions out there, I think that I like Debian the best. I also really like the fact that they are more concerned with quality then being there with the newest toys on the block.
Think linux is just for gay geeks? Then check this out
I'm hoping they're serious about changing to a much shorter development cycle. 2.2 was out of date enough when I installed it over a year ago.
--
[2002-02-16] Release Status Update
/org/non-us.debian.org/queue) and seems to
/125, /133 or /240 to test them to make sure they're not
To: debian-devel-announce@lists.debian.org
Subject: [2002-02-16] Release Status Update
From: Anthony Towns
Date: Sat, 16 Feb 2002 12:23:18 +1000
Mail-copies-to: nobody
Mail-followup-to: debian-devel-announce@lists.debian.org
Organisation: Lacking
User-agent: Mutt/1.3.27i
Hi guys,
The good news, and the bad news.
The good news is that base is back in good shape. glibc, base-passwd and
rsync have all had their RC bugs fixed which is very pleasing. There are
still bugs in some important packages, including apache, bind, binutils,
bison, emacs, iproute, kdebase-libs, menu, php3, sudo, tetex, and vim,
but most of these seem fairly controllable.
The bad news is that this means we're probably releasing soon, and that of
the hundreds of less important packages with RC bugs (eg, bugzilla, craft,
crossfire-{client,server}, epic4, fvwm95, gmc, gnome-admin, intuitively,
kdepim, moon-lander, tkdesk, wine, and xosview) will be getting randomly
ripped out of testing (in the case where bugs apply to the version in
testing, anyway). What this means, is that if packages you're interested
in have accumulated RC bugs (ie serious, grave or critical) you've almost
run out of time to get them fixed if you want them released.
Other news:
* new incoming's being tested on pandora now (if you're
interested, see
be working out okay, so the whole crypto-in-main transition
looks like being on track for the first time in history.
* new boot-floppies (3.0.19) are available for all architectures
but alpha, mipsel [0] and sparc. Please test these (and build
them if you're on one of the architectures that hasn't already
done so) since there'll probably only be one more b-f's release
before 3.0r0.
* over the next few days, we're going to start doing install and
upgrade testing somewhat seriously (with the aim of doing it
well for the entirety of the next release). If you haven't
already tried and upgrade from potato, or a fresh install,
try one now so that you don't get embarassed by newbies and
users pointing out obvious bugs that a Visual Basic programmer
would've been ashamed of....
There's a BugSquash party now on in #debian-bugs on irc.openprojects.net,
so wander on over there to help rescue packages that're worth keeping
in woody.
It's also okay to help fix non-release-critical bugs too.
Cheers,
aj
[0] mipsel b-f's are built, but are waiting on someone with a DecStation
5000/120,
completely broken. See debian-mips@lists.debian.org.
--
Anthony Towns
We came. We Saw. We Conferenced. http://linux.conf.au/
``Debian: giving you the power to shoot yourself in each
toe individually.'' -- with kudos to Greg Lehey
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
All I can say is this: I *seriously* hope we're using at least the 2.0 kernel.
...that every time I download and burn a Linux distro, the next version appears within 8 hours - 3 days?
Debian has PHP3? Welcome to the 90's, Debian!
That's pretty good progress, considering that, not even a month ago, developers were quitting Debian in disgust because it appeared Woody might never get released.
ya i think ill be released my on woody when this one comes out!-n-rs-
Debian is being released soon!
in other news, hell has recently frozen over.
I was going to make a joke about how my woody was read for release right now, but it looks like 10^4 people already did that.
I must say, I've been waiting for this for a long, long time. Imagine running Mozilla 1.0 on Debian 3.0. Ah well, gotta save some things for future generations, right?
(I'm joking of course. These are both fantastic projects. I'm especially psyched to get my hands on Woody as soon as I get my new hard drive...)
... has got to be the best idea in the last five years.
List of all the Release Critical bugs (15 feb. 2002)
Duke Nukem Forever has gone gold, hell froze over, and I got a date ;)
Seriously though, good from them. It will be nice to have magazines that compare linux distros compare woody vs. redhat, not potatoe (which is woefully old) to redhat.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I think Debian needs a 2.4 kernel as the default if Debian is going to shake its image as hopelessly outdated. For instance, even now you can apt-get up-to-date packages, but most people don't go beyond the defaults. As for me, I go beyond a little: I like to get security patches. Love those. But I'm wary of upgrading other things -- I've tried a KDE 2.1 to 2.2 upgrade that really made my system screwy, and a SuSE 2.4.10 kernel upgrade to 2.4.14 that lost my ext3 functionality. Of course I fixed these things, but I'm wary now. It took time, which is valuable to me. Even with Debian, you can apt-get yourself into trouble. So as someone on the sidelines (well, maybe more than that, I've done a lot of Debian installs), I would encourage the Debian folks to either reconsider the default install, or actively plan for a 3.1 (or even 3.0.1) release that will happen soon after 3.0.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
if you have a recent version of apt, and you put the following lines into /etc/apt/prefences it will get unstable packages when there is no testing version.
--- begin cut here ---
Package: *
Pin: release a=unstable
Pin-Priority: 50
--- end cut here ---
enjoy,
-- p
damn, i posted this before but i misspelled preferences, so to be clear: /etc/apt/preferences it will get unstable packages when there is no testing version.
if you have a recent version of apt, and you put the following lines into
--- begin cut here ---
Package: *
Pin: release a=unstable
Pin-Priority: 50
--- end cut here ---
enjoy,
-- p
From discussion with Debain users (and time spent administering Debian boxed at my workplace) Debian's rpm support doesn't work that well for anything apart from large self-contained statically compiled packages. The problem being that the Linux Standards Base will probably be considered the definition of what a Linux distro is in a couple of years (and is starting to be used as a yardstick these days). Yes Debian ostensibly supports the LSB via alien, but how well?
/opt have had to change, and if they haven't, they've been looked upon negatively (and rightly so) for their lack of standards support. So how well does alien work, and would you use it to install some, or even most software on your system? A standardized packaging system is useful for more than just closed source apps - its useful for every open source app maintainer that's tired of maintaining different sets of packages for Red hat, Suse, Debian, Mandrake, Connectiva, and every other distro out there. Theoretically, the KDE people (for example) should only have to release one set of packages per OS. Doing otherwise wastes a great amoutn of time that could be used elsewhere.
/me waits for the inevitable negative moderations from people who disagree with what I'm saying but can't voice their own opinions and repond maturely.
The distributions which put initscripts in nonstandard places have had to change, those install packages into
And yeah, I'm a Red Hat user who has posted a non 100% supportive comment about Debian in a Debian release news item.
I've recently become a debian user from slackware. Apt-get is by far the best tool I've ever used however I was shocked when I installed debian standard and checked the versions of some of the tools. SSH was at version 1.2.3!!! which was insane. Testing wasn't a whole lot better. However I am quite satisfied with unstable currently. Although it breaks from time to time on my laptop.
"Can't sleep. Clowns will eat me"
This is a valid question: Why does it take so long for new Debian releases to come out? Even OpenBSD seems to have more releases with security audits, new features, etc.
What makes it even worse is the fact that by the time releases come out, many of the software packages are out of date. Sure, they are almost guaranteed to work, but is it really that big of an issue? I have no problems with rolling my own if a package does not work.
Another thing I do not like about Debian is the installer. Dammit, if the packages are so good, then it should be even easier to create a good installer without many bugs, etc. For Linux itself, there are other installers that can take care of a lot of those development issues.
To personify Debian, I would describe the person as autistic with a generally obsessive mind on minute details, and slow learning capabilities.
hundreds of. . .packages. . .will be getting randomly ripped out of testing. . .
What does this mean to me, as a woody user? Will lots of packages be ignored by apt after i dist-upgrade following the switch?
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
Now that "Woody" is the base for my Debian installation, I can start working on my new, security focused distro "Stiffy," followed up by next Uber-Gaming project, "Hard On."
Makes me wonder were Potato fits into it all....
but I am compelled to share with everyone how I misread the caption...
All but three RC base bugs are belong to us.
:(
-9mm-
How long as woody been in development? How old is the last 'official' release? Jeez.... I switched to running slackware because it had more up to date software... IMHO that is
Am I the only one that finds that subject hilarious? :)
Sure, most people using Debian as a server are running the stable release, but I was under the impression that almost all desktop users were tracking unstable for want of the hundreds of packages missing in the age-old 2.2 release.
Having all these things fixed for Woody release would be nice, but I'm guessing there's almost nobody out there who'd be affected by these vanishing.
How many of you Debian folk are using stable for something other than a server?
Actually, that piece of woody web page is somewhat stale -- I've recently heard that boot-floppies 3.0.19 include a version which installs kernel 2.4. I'll go update the web page.
Well, you know how sometimes you look at a story title and only see part of it at first?
'Woody Nearing Release.'
Debian has php4 too. Really, people think Debian is out of date, it's not. It's just stable and DFSG free. (except for php4 - see the Zend engine...).
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
How long does it stay up?
And I was so looking forward to laughing at the "Why the hell was this posted? I dont want to know about stuff that will be released soon, I want to know when the stuff is released! Why the hell is this news for nerds? Why dont we just post when redhat makes another beta? Or when Linus builds another pre version of a kernel! Yeah that'd make a really interesting news site! Screw you slashdot!" posts...
"Debian Woody Nearing Release"
*quick!* somebody get a paper towel!
I am going to run my Linus beowufl cluster using these softwares! And I will play my favorite Linus game DOOM on it.
PS did you miss me? I know you missed me.
Im surprised by the amount of "slashdotters" who, while bagging Debian for being out-of-date, are painfully unaware of the fact that Debian is actually 3 different distributions, i.e. Stable/Potato, Testing/Woody and Unstable/Sid. You can have the latest and greatest software with Debian, all it takes is a simple find and replace on /etc/apt/sources.list to change the branch apt-get gets it's package list from.
Serious, however, Debian is the best Linux distro I ever used. Some of its approaches are questionable - like "alternatives" - but its as close to a well-designed system as one can get with an eclectic system like GNU/Linux.
The major griefs are - obviously, others already pointes that out - the bogus release cycle nearly forcing you to run unstable, and the package management system, which rocks, but only as long as you are just installing pre-made binaries. I never tried to create a RPM, but making a .deb from some arbitrary code you downloaded is definetly way to much work (compare it to creating a BSD port, where the hardest thing is to determine the best download URL for the source tgz). While Debians package collection is of course impressive, once you install something not included, you most likely will not care about your packaging system, which is always a bad thing.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
I thought that having a release with six kajillion packages "doesn't slow down the release." Yeah, right. I wish I could get out a gattling gun and mow down all the extra cruft that goes in each Debian release. Split the base system from the extra crap. Get Debian complete base install down to a couple hundred mb and make what is on that cd the base system. Screw the other crap.
.007 for three years while waiting for the next release. Sure we can patch something .007 forever but NO we CAN'T UPGRADE IT! Yeah, OK. So you would rather use something version .007 patch level 2342304234 then upgrade to something version .now and give feedback to the developers of something? Navel gazing in extreeeeeme!
Oh well. Won't happen. We must use something version
This is stupid.
Must be a graduate of the Dan Quayle school of spelling.
I don't think one developer quitting merits the plural here. You make it sound like many instead of just one.
"Debian Woody Nearing Release"
"from the long-time-comin' dept."
is any more proof needed that Slashdot is a site for gay homosexuals?
Must be a graduate of the Dan Quayle school of spelling.
...and I suppose you are from the Tom Daschle school of Assholes.
RPM 3.05 will happily install any RPM in existence.
Red Hat didn't join the LSB for a couple of years precisely to avoid these inevitable (and completely unjustified [well you didn't provide any supporting arguments]) accusations. They lost out on few things too - eg, initscript directories (and thank god, rc.d/init.d sucks). Everyone has (and has already often made) concessions towards the LSB, Red Hat, Debian, SuSE or otherwise.
I use sid, and want to switch to sarge as soon as it's filled with sid's packages. I also want to continue updating from sid before the release. Got a script for that one?
--
grep "xercist"
Thanks for your insightful [0] comments on our release process. Could you give me a URL for the webpage of your Linux distribution? Given your cutting insight into the issues of building one, I assume you have one with some useful features we could learn from. I also presume it's quite stable, secure, and up-to-date, and already runs on a half dozen hardware architectures and at least two kernels.
Thanks,
Daniel
[0] or is that inciteful?
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
Actually, the Zend engine is now covered under a BSD-like license, just like PHP4, and should be acceptable according to the Debian guidelines. Both PHP and the Zend engine contain the original BSD advertising clause, which some people don't like, but other than that, they're both fine. See http://www.zend.com/license/2_00.txt for details.
J
It seems that you misunderstand - Alien works great, it makes RPMs, DPKGs, and TGZs interchangeable. Your problem comes from the fact that Redhat RPMs (like Debian DPKGs and Slackware TGZs) also contain control information, effectively shell scripts that rely on the filesystem of the intended distribution. Since Redhat and Debian (all releases) use differnt locations for e.g. their rc.X files (initscripts), the control information isn't portable.
/opt directory was completely unsed by Debian, and AFAIK has always been that way. Since the release of Potato, something as laborious as moving every single changelog, readme, info page, man page and other textual file from its previous location (usuallt /usr/doc) into the FHS mandated /usr/share/doc hierarchy. This was of dubious benefit at best, other than strict adherence to the FHS.
.TGZ archives, and Free Software Operating systems should respect the conventions... especially in the common case where the software project existed longer than the OS in question. For the most part, the Free Software BSDs have done this. FreeBSD developed their Ports system allowing them to keep a tree of makefiles which would aid in compilation of software packages that isn't part of the standard system. The exception is that the BSDs tend to have integrated XFree86 into their "base system", so they have modified XFree86 from the standard distribution. Debian has gone much further than this, packaging almost any Free Software of interest, for inclusion into their system... making Debian the largest, most versatile system to date.
The Linux Standards Base is a fairly useful effort, but it includes the Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, which seems to be what you intended to take Debain to task for. AFAIK, the RPM standard is specified only in the FHS, and not directly in the LSB. So you meant "Debian supports the FHS via alien..."
The FHS is full of good intentions, but unfortunately the reality falls far short. DJB has a number of valid criticisms that are as of yet not addressed by the LSB, or more accurately, the FHS. While I tend to think that standards are a good thing, I don't think that you should ignore convention in favor of provably flawed standards, so the FHS is not as desireable as I once felt. Without regard to the benefit of the FHS, I will argue that Debian supports it, in fact the Debian Project has made FHS support a specific requirement in their official policy manual.
The part of the FHS that you seem to be missing, is that while RPM is the official packaging format of the FHS, that doesn't mean that Redhat is automatically compliant. Rather, the standard RPM format is that defined in the publication Maximum RPM, and Redhat has continues development of their RPM format since that time. That means that the average RPM distributed with Redhat is not FHS compliant. Offical standard RPMs are handled by Debian via Alien flawlessly, and likely by Redhat and SuSE as well.
More importantly, the "Maximum RPM" RPM format isn't the most important feature of the FHS. More important is adherence to the recommendations of where in the directory tree different types of files should be. It seems that Debian is the most compliant distro, closely followed by SuSE last time I saw a comparison. You may have noticed when you administered the Debian Boxen that the
Just a small point of contention, every "Linux distribution" can arguably be called a distinct OS -- Unless you support that they are all just implementations of the GNU OS. But NetBSD and FreeBSD are just distributions of 386BSD. OpenBSD is just another version of NetBSD. AIX and IRIX are just distributions of UNIX. Even if all Linux distros are unified by the LSB, that's not much different than how all Unices have been unified by the POSIX standard. And Remember, Debian keeps their own Linux tree, as does Redhat, both distinct from the Official Linux at Kernel.org.
Theoretically, software developers should only have to release their files as
As a Red Hat user, it it is unfortunate but understandable that you didn't know more about the FHS and APT when you administered the Debian boxen. Perhaps you would have realised that you were likely using a non standard RedHat 7.x (e.g.) specific RPM. Even Mandrake, which directly descended from Redhat, has enough of a delta from Redhat that not all RPMs will interchange between the two. RPMs intended for other distros will tend to fare much worse. Even an RPM for Redhat 6.0 isn't recommended for Redhat 7.3, so it was a bit naive to expect a non-FHS RPM to work. Better would have been to type:
apt-cache search pppoe
If you wanted to install Roaring Penguin's PPPoE RPM to see it it was available, and what the APT package is named. If you had an RPM that you needed to install, then odds are that it was available. Then you type:
apt-get install pppoe
and all would have been well. Even if you had the FHS compliant rp-pppoe.RPM, using the APT/.dpkg version would be preferred, as the DPKG format has superior dependancy handling.
I am heartened to see that you haven't been down modded, I I hope that my post has been informative.
-castlan
Thanks but no thanks. But I'm getting close. I simply wonder why you would want 6 kazillion packages in the distrib when it could simply be the base system.
You can continue to come back to my stupid posts with "show me your dick" or whatever but the fact remains that people are leaving debian, debian is lagging behind, the release process is very slow, etc.
Just because I don't work on another distrib doesn't mean my dick is too small to comment on the problems.
Some things are pretty obvious. If you would rather see the dick than the light just look in your pants.
Ok, ok, ok... I admit in a fit of boredom a bit of trolling was hard to pass up. But in all honesty the central issues I was trolling about are real issues and are causing problems. Of course it is better to be part of the solution instead of part of the problem but sometimes discussion of issues is enlightening. Debian people most likely do not want to discuss people leaving their project, the problems with their project, the release schedule ("it'll be released when it's done"), etc.
Obviously Debian is a not a commercial product but if people who did this out of the good of their heart get so sick of the slow release schedule that they are leaving it seems obvious that there are a number of problems. Of course you can say "slashdot troll" and so can I but all criticism of Debian is pretty much ignored. The Debian project is a very insular project that isn't very open to criticism or change.
Those things are pretty obvious from the outside. I don't know what people think of these issues on the inside and frankly I don't really care. All I care about is progress.
The funny part of this whole thread is that I'm replying on a machine running unstable. But the fact is I don't think I'd use Debian on a server. As a sysadmin the core release makes sense but the fact that other non-essential packages like Apache are never upgraded in a release does not. I'd rather run the mainstream release of a package with perhaps only a few modifications for install location than the Debianized patched to hell version.
So I currently run FreeBSD and RedHat (sigh) on my servers. I'd love to run Debian but it simply doesn't make any sense.
Ok, now you can reply with six million reasons why I'm wrong, how this university runs Debian stable on 3,000 boxes, yadda yadda.
This post courtesy of Microsoft's Beachwood in mission. Er, Microsoft Speech Recognition.
Geez, you dittoheads are so fucking prickly it's pathetic. Go have a drink and pick up a few DUI's like our draft-dodging armchair warrior VP, maybe that will help you relax.
this post brought to you by Microsoft speech recognition
I simply wonder why you would want 6 kazillion packages in the distrib when it could simply be the base system.
/. headlines, you will have only a narrow and sensationalized view of matters.
Why not? Having precompiled packages that integrate with the system is a very valuable thing to me and many other developers and users.
As for "just the base system"...the primary reason the freeze was held up was because of bugs in the base system, many of them bugs from the upstream source relating to failures on obscure hardware or when using charsets other than the default one.
The primary reason the freeze is now progressing again is because the base system is down to under five "makes the package unsuitable for release" bugs.
Packages not in base or standard will simply be dumped if they aren't ready in time (about two weeks from now), as you'd know if you had read the article.
the fact remains that people are leaving debian, debian is lagging behind, the release process is very slow, etc.
The fact remains that a handful of maintainers have left in the last year due to burnout, the number of Debian maintainers is increasing overall, woody is a very impressive distribution, and it is (at long last) moving towards release.
The fact remains that if you only read
The fact remains that sometimes experience matters, and uninformed opinions are uninformed. "I don't know a thing about aeronautics, engineering, or fluid dynamics, but I've flown on lots of planes, and I have this great idea about how you can make your 747s go faster.."
Everyone has seen the accusation that "all those crufty packages" are holding up the release, it's been discussed dozens of times on the mailing lists, and not one person has yet produced a specific and concrete example of a way in which so-called "package bloat" is holding up the release. Hand-waving arguments, personal attacks, and oblique references to Fred Brooks are easier, I guess. *shrug*
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
...the package management system, which rocks, but only as long as you are just installing pre-made binaries. I never tried to create a RPM, but making a .deb from some arbitrary code you downloaded is definetly way to much work...
.deb (or a .rpm or .tgz (for slackware) for that matter) as easy as a single command. Sure it doesn't take any dependencies into account, but you can't have everything :)
You should investigate checkinstall. It makes making a
In the spoon, there is no Soviet Russia!
You might want to try netselect to find the nearest package mirror. The man page for apt-get goes over all the features. I find the much-touted 'apt-get update' -> 'apt-get dist-upgrade' to be overkill. For one thing, some packages haven't been put together or mirrored everywhere yet. The ease of apt-get can be deceiving, too. The Mozilla maintainer (Takuo Kitame) split out some of the extra goodies (ie. DOMInspector, JavaScript debugger, etc.) into separate packages, which took me a few days to figure out. Vaya con Dios!
My conversion has been detailed here.
:)
I'm not going to get into the Debian/Red Hat argument here. To me, they're both fine distributions that deserve the attention that they're due. I don't understand the "stability" issue that some Debian fanatics get into. Red Hat has been stable as a rock for me. The thing that makes Debian rule is how easy it is to maintain and keep up to date.
If you're a Red Hat/Mandrake user and has been looking to convert, this might be useful. FWIW, Debian is a mighty fine distro, give it a try, though you have been warned, it can be addictive.
I did a netwrok install, i only needed to make a boot and root disk, _everything_ else (even base and kernel modules) i downloaded via the net.
0 2- 02-07/images-1.44/bf2.4/
I was pretty lucky as my net driver (rtl8139) was built into the kernel, a lot of people would need the driver disks.
I had no problems at all during hte install, there are still outstanding issues being worked on though.
images from your
/debian/dists/testing/main/disks-i386/3.0.19-20
I think it's a great idea that Debian has developed wherein they are able to slide distributions through different levels of stability: Stable, Testing, Unstable. This is really something that is ahead of every other Linux distro out there
One of the biggest claimed advantages that Linux has over so many other Operating Systems is that the stability is so much greater. It is for this reason that I have switched to Linux myself. But in reading the posts here, it seems that more people are concerned with the newest fad feature over stability when they speak of a computer to use on a regular basis with little acknowledgement for the need of a stable system
At least Debian gives you the option to push yourself into the newer products that are available. The only thing that is asked in return is that you provide bugreport feedback
I believe that the other Linux distros, and indeed other OSes, could gain a lot from the Debian model of software development in that they provide different tiers of advanced products wich you can select based on your desire to "fiddle" with the installation.
I do however have some issue with the bloat that Debian has been gaining in the last 18 months that I have been using it. There are interdependencies that are being forced into the installation that are getting very expensive to manage. Examples are: Apache now requires mysql-client to be installed. But it is only used if you are interested in using mysql for authentication. That's a rather heavy handed requirement for a rather specialized function. Similarly, I was very happy with emacs until they make a package requirement for XFree86 in order to install emacs. Last I checked, emacs was still a CLI compatable editing tool. This has really messed with my remote machine administration. And before you tell me to use vi, remember, it's my choice so zark off.
I think that Debian has some really great ideas in it, but I am also wary that there are some bad practices that are encroaching onto the overall distribution as evidenced by the two examples I have cited above.
Well I don't know... what exactly is that you need from the mainstream package that is missing in the one in potato? I mean, you could build a potato package from the woody sources (apt-get source apache, with woody as deb-src in sources.list), but... why?
Funny. The only Linux I allow in my servers is Debian stable.
The fact remains that if you only read /. headlines, you will have only a narrow and sensationalized view of matters.
/. sensationalized view of Debian? I think not.
:).
So you're saying that the Debian doesn't have a slow release problem? That is only a
The fact remains that sometimes experience matters, and uninformed opinions are uninformed. "I don't know a thing about aeronautics, engineering, or fluid dynamics, but I've flown on lots of planes, and I have this great idea about how you can make your 747s go faster.."
Maybe that is because people are getting so frustrated at a lack of progress in the change that they'll suggest anything... It's easy to shoot people down but I don't really see you coming back with any response besides "this isn't an issue and you aren't fit to question/make suggestions" and ignoring things that are an issue.
Everyone has seen the accusation that "all those crufty packages" are holding up the release, it's been discussed dozens of times on the mailing lists, and not one person has yet produced a specific and concrete example of a way in which so-called "package bloat" is holding up the release. Hand-waving arguments, personal attacks, and oblique references to Fred Brooks are easier, I guess. *shrug*
Maybe part of that is because these people are partly right. FreeBSD has a nice steady release process and the ports system works well. Obviously Debian isn't FreeBSD but it doesn't hurt to look at other ways of doing things.
Anyway, I'm done... I don't think that my critizing is going to help anything. Helping would be much more beneficial. It's just that reality is so frustrating sometimes
Well I don't know... what exactly is that you need from the mainstream package that is missing in the one in potato? I mean, you could build a potato package from the woody sources (apt-get source apache, with woody as deb-src in sources.list), but... why?
.debs and that is what I'll probably do in the future when I have more time to read the packages guide.
Because as a sysadmin running mainstream packages is more beneficial to prepackaged things. The combination of Apache+PHP+PostgreSQL/MySQL is far better managed outside of the Debian process. If you can live with PHP 4.0.1 for a couple years than go for it.
The easy solution there is to simply build my own
Funny. The only Linux I allow in my servers is Debian stable.
RedHat wasn't and isn't my choice.
Debian people most likely do not want to discuss people leaving their project
:)
:)
:) In any event, it's a huge technical improvement.
:) ). The number of packages has little to do with it, as far as I can see.
You keep bringing this up. Only a few people (less than ten, probably less than five; I don't have an exact count and not all the announcements were public) have left in the last year, and most of those were burn-outs who have continued their involvement with Debian as users. (that is to say, they are still active on the mailing lists and submit bugs/patches; they just don't take on the commitment of maintaining packages, etc) Only one person cited the release schedule as a reason for leaving. That's hardly droves.
Do you really expect 6000 people to be continually happy with everything about the project? I hope you don't think we're the Borg
I also never said I think the release process was perfect; I merely disagreed with what you claimed were the flaws in it.
all criticism of Debian is pretty much ignored. The Debian project is a very insular project that isn't very open to criticism or change.
It's quite hard to take it seriously when most of the criticism is making the same few claims without providing a shred of hard evidence, and when most of the changes suggested are the same one we've heard before.
If people are terse in replying, it's because these specific issues have been discussed for years in gigantic threads already, and the list traffic is high enough that no-one wants to waste more bandwidth on it. The consensus each time has been that the number of packages is a red herring, and we need to look elsewhere for the problems.
Ben Collins recently observed that the "Debian is dying, it has too much bloat" thread has been around, in various forms, since he became involved with the project, and I can say pretty much the same thing. Some people even suggested, only somewhat facetiously, that it's been around ever since Ian realized he couldn't maintain the entire distribution himself
I don't know what people think of these issues on the inside and frankly I don't really care. All I care about is progress.
How admirably utilitarian of you. It also absolves you from making any constructive suggestions that people will listen to..
Oh, and if you want my personal opinion: there have been a lot of technical measures taken to streamline Debian releases in the past year or two. Many people have suggested that woody's long cycle implies that these measures are failures. I personally suspect, although I'm not yet sure I believe, that these measures are responsible for the fact that woody is being *released at all*.
Compared to what I remember from previous releases, the number of coordination problems we've had with coordination and dependency issues does not seem *to me* to have increased proportionally to the package count; in fact, I think it may actually have gone down. (this is all a very fuzzy estimate, and should not be taken particularly seriously)
Automatic dependency checks to ensure an internally consistent "testing" distribution, BTS enhancements for all manner of things, automatic lists of base system bugs, continual improvements in the package maintainence tools (debhelper, debconf, lintian, etc)...all of these have addressed particular problems in the distribution. I think that claiming that they didn't work simply because they didn't solve every single problem at once is failing to see the forest for the trees.
And finally, since I said I don't think your explanation is correct, here are some specific things I have seen that probably held things up, based on my personal experience within the Debian Project:
* Effort was diverted from boot-floppies to debian-installer; then, when it appeared that debian-installer wouldn't be releasable in time for woody, it was put on hold and the installation team scrambled to get boot-floppies to work again (since it had since been broken by changes to the base system) We lost at least several months here.
A major problem here (and the reason we want to get rid of boot-floppies) is that the boot-floppies code is fragile and tends to break whenever it is so much as sneezed upon. It's been a culprit in past delays as well.
debian-installer will be used for woody+1, and to hear joeyh talk about it, it's the coolest thing since debhelper
* Many new architectures were added, some at the "last minute". This resulted in many more "interesting" ways that packages can fail to build, especially since the build tools often behave subtly differently on different archs. In some cases, we actually have to use completely separate branches of code! (gcc 2.95, 2.96, and 3.0 are all required for at least one arch, for instance, so all code must compile with all three of them)
(I should add that Debian has probably made a tremendous contribution to the portability of free software in general, simply by building every single program in the archive, no matter how exalted or humble, for architectures the author often never heard of, and submitting patches for the failures)
At the same time, some core packages always seemed to be broken on some obscure arch, generally due to the immaturity of that port of the program. Today g++ wouldn't compile hppa code; tomorrow libc didn't build from source on s390. And the kinds of platform bugs that crop up in these packages tend to be hairy and hard to solve.
* Many maintainers became too busy to maintain their packages (perfectly ok) but left themselves as the official maintainer in the package system (not ok!) This meant that many packages became buggy and went unattended to for far too long before anyone noticed. In fact, this is still a problem, although measures (technical and social) have been and are still being put in place to combat it.
This is the one place where size hurts: with so many maintainers, so-called "MIA"-ness seems to be somewhat inevitable. The main fix here appears to be breaking down the semi-feudal "one maintainer, one package" paradigm that has become ingrained in the distribution.
I think that sums up the major things I have seen slowing the project down, and they're based on hard (or at least firmly mushy
And of course, remember: these are only my personal opinions. I may be wrong, and other maintainers probably disagree violently with me.
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
A few corrections..
:)
:) -- the improvements in our infrastructure have enabled us to greatly expand the archive with relatively little trouble.
6000 people
That should of course be ~1000 at last count.
I was somehow thinking people=packages or something.
Also, I realized it looks like I'm contradicting myself a bit: first "size doesn't matter" and then "technical measures to deal with issues are helping us release.."
Basically, I think that archive size has not been much of a problem precisely because people have been addressing some specific technical problems. Even if they weren't meaning to work on that
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
I see your point. And yes, I've been able to live with PHP 4.0 for a couple of years, indeed (4.0.3, actually). PostgreSQL and MySQL from potato, too --never had a problem.
Sure, sometimes I need a newer version of some package (say, openldap). For those I usually pull the woody source package and build potato binaries. Check this article, it explains the basics on doing this trick.
Man, trust me, is far easier to use the woody source packages. Building debs is not trivial.
Debian has become a dinosaur that will just die out one day.
It is a system that wants to be everything for everybody by including thousands of packages.
Have you looked at the package list recently ? Main is friggin 1700k (compressed) !
Hundreds of developers who want to push their little pet package into the distribution, and no true leadership or vision behind the whole thing.
I will not be surprised when mirror admins start dropping it because of its huge size, and then the convenient apt-get (which meanwhile has been cloned for other dist-s) will be useless.
I used to be a die-hard Debian fan from the 1.3 era, but I cannot recommend it to anyone anymore, and I use it mainly because I just know it too well.
Commercial and other free distributions are taking what's best in debian technology, and are offering leaner and more modern stable releases.
FUD!! Only one developer quit.
The last time I did a comparison, OpenBSD and Debian were neck and neck, though I theorized that it looked like Debian would fall behind by the Next release of OpenBSD. OpenBSD releases every 6 months, December and June, disregarding subjective milestones. That is, 3.0 just meant that it was the release after 2.9. Regardless, I was wrong, Debian has kept up, even if the releases aren't as consistently timed. OpenBSD released 3.0 on December 1, 2001, OpenBSD 2.9 released June 1, 2001, and so on. Debian released 2.2r5 on January 10, 2002. 2.2r4, was released on November 5, 2001. 2.2r3, was released on April 17, 2001. 2.2r2, was released on December 3, 2000. To me, they both seem to maintain about 2 releases per year.
.TGZs and building your own cutting edge system.
/etc/apt/sources.list towards the Debian archive to upgrade to Woody.
Of course, Debian is very conservative, issuing only bug fixes and security patches, and strictly limiting new development for each new major relaseWoody. OpenBSD releases are also stable compared to Debian, but the development isn't segregated from the bug-fixes via Feature-freezes with Major/Minor releases as in Debian. Off the top of my head, OpenBSD had some significant changes, including XFree86 4.1 and PF replacing IPF.
You say that by the time releases come out, software packages are out of date. I have to challenge that - cutting edge packages are by definition not stable, and a package being "out of date" doesn't mean that it is obsolete just because a newer version exists. Bugfixes are not a valid excuse to upgrade to the latest version of a software release, as you may add just as many bugs as you fix. The Right Way is to backport fixes, which Debian does on a regular basis. Additional features are only significant if you find them useful, they don't make your current version any less useful. If you find that you need features added in a newer version, then it is trivial to apt-get update leetproggie.
If you think that rolling your own version of a package is preferable to a guaranteed working version, that means that you shouldn't be using a distribution: you should be grabbing your own
As it was already established that you shouldn't be relying on a stable distro but rolling your own system, you shouldn't need to rely on an installer. Just extract your Linux filesytem from a tarball and be done with it. You can roll your own options, so why do you need an installer to walk you through it? If you are as leet as you imply, the Debian installer is ideal... it allows you to use the shell to complete as many steps as you wish, and will take over from where you left it when you start to trip over your own feet. What is so awful about the Debian installer? It isn't a WIMP GUI? What are some of these "many bugs, etc."?
If you really need a WIMP (Windowing Interface, Mouse Pointer) then you should look into Progeny Debian, which made a good installer (read: point and click) which leverages the packages. The same GUI installer is reused for later reconfiguration of the system as well. Unfortunately, Progeny no longer sells their GUI improved version of Debian (Newton release, a meld of Potato and Woody) but you can can still find an ISO if you would like to try it. If you become comfortable with the Debian CLI subsystem, you can always point
As for your personification, you should at least qualify Debian as having High Functioning Autism, or perhaps Asperger's Syndrome. But the prognosis is very good, as Debian has an excellent support community. And that obsessive mind works quite well with clearly defined rules, which makes the Debian Policy Manual quite a boon with the thoroughly defined package dependancies superior to competing operating systems.
When you say up to date, do you mean the distribution installed on your system, or the CDROM/ISO? Rather than reinstalling each new version with a CD, it is much simpler and to seamlessly upgrade your system with one command, and you don't need to wait 6 months for a new release to do it. You can do upgrade daily if you wish. It seems a little silly to wait for CDs to be pressed and distributed, or even to download entire 650 Megabyte ISOs when you can download only the individul files that changed, saving time and bandwidth.
You can think what you want, but it might make sense to consider that the "testing" distribution style is still pretty new, this upcoming release will be the first to utilize it. After that, I really do except that feature realeases will occur more frequently. Of course, that will have little effect on current Debian users with net connections, who always had the option of tracking more current releases if stability wasn't their top priority.
-castlan
Anyone who says Debian is out of date is just wrong.
So you're saying that the Debian doesn't have a slow release problem? That is only a /. sensationalized view of Debian? I think not.
/. really has been that complicit in this)
I quote you:
the fact remains that people are leaving debian, debian is lagging behind
"people are leaving debian" is sensationalized. See my other post.
And honestly, the "lagging behind" bit is overdramatized in my opinion. 6-month cycles for major new releases are not a necessity, folks.
I was referring more to the "Debian is Dying" overtones, a meme that some people seem to have picked up lately. I don't know where they got it from. Maybe they like the alliteration.
(although I'm not sure
Maybe that is because people are getting so frustrated at a lack of progress in the change that they'll suggest anything
Fine, but it doesn't mean that these repetitive "suggestions" do anything more than clog up the communication channels every time they have to be discarded. (about every three months on average)
It's easy to shoot people down but I don't really see you coming back with any response besides "this isn't an issue and you aren't fit to question/make suggestions" and ignoring things that are an issue.
Likewise, it's easy to make broad claims about what things are serious "issues" without backing them up. When someone does indeed do this, and comes up with the same "new" idea as many other people who are unfamiliar with the situation, I tend to dismiss the comment as coming from a person who doesn't have enough information or experience to assess the situation accurately.
Maybe part of that is because these people are partly right. FreeBSD has a nice steady release process and the ports system works well. Obviously Debian isn't FreeBSD but it doesn't hurt to look at other ways of doing things.
Another explanation is that "for every complex problem, there is a solution which is simple, obvious, straightforward, and wrong"...
Actually, it's you should mention that, because someone started a thread about that just the other day on debian-devel. It's still going; I'm browsing the most recent few messages in another window. Many people in the thread agree that some changes are a good idea, based on the experience of this cycle; however, we can't change the entire process this close to a release.
Personally, I think the closest thing to the "split it up" approach is that we could put out several quick releases on a frozen core -- but changing the core will be a pain anyway, we can't get around that. It's the nature of the core.
And I'm not really convinced this is as simple as it seems. In this area, the devil is generally in the details. Two years ago, we thought "testing" was going to issue in a golden age of quick releases. It really has been a tremendous help (IMO), but it hasn't lived up to some of the overly high expectations that some people had of it.
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
You make some interesting points and I definately agree that the "Debian is dying" crap is just that - crap. I hadn't realized that such discussions come up so regularly on debian-devel. I'll have to start reading some of the mailing lists. The least that can be said is that the next couple of years will continue to be interesting.
/. :).
I think for me the best thing to do would be to learn the packaging process and do my own packages for things I can't live without. That would be far more beneficial to myself than whining about crap on
I'm surprised there haven't been more trolls about the word choice of the title...
You've made some interesting points. I'm going to drop anything inflamatory just to drop it and get on with things. No flame intended... I do care what people think on the inside and after some thought I'd have to take back the "insular" comment as it is obvious a lot of work goes on via mailing lists.
Many maintainers became too busy to maintain their packages (perfectly ok) but left themselves as the official maintainer in the package system (not ok!) This meant that many packages became buggy and went unattended to for far too long before anyone noticed. In fact, this is still a problem, although measures (technical and social) have been and are still being put in place to combat it..
I think what led to that insular comment was the general feeling of having the "one maintainer, one package" thing and the problems that result. It sounds like that is being fixed and seeing people say "fix it or I'm going to fix it myself" in terms of abandoned packages is very refreshing...
Oh, and if you want my personal opinion: there have been a lot of technical measures taken to streamline Debian releases in the past year or two. Many people have suggested that woody's long cycle implies that these measures are failures. I personally suspect, although I'm not yet sure I believe, that these measures are responsible for the fact that woody is being *released at all*.
Well as I said in my other post it will be interesting watching the next couple years. Change takes time...
You point out a lot of holes in some arguements that come up fairly regularly here and (it sounds like from your posts) on the debian mailing lists. Definately gives me something to think about. Thanks for posting for what that's worth...
Man, trust me, is far easier to use the woody source packages. Building debs is not trivial.
I trust you but I'll have to look at it myself. At least I can read over the package sources for earlier versions. For some things we can't live with an older version of PHP/Apache/DB. Hard choices...
Sure, sometimes I need a newer version of some package (say, openldap). For those I usually pull the woody source package and build potato binaries. Check this article [debianplanet.org], it explains the basics on doing this trick.
Now that does sound sweet. Thanks for pointing it out.
Why was this modded down? The moderators are smoking CRACK.
W is starting WWIII. He is going to start burning blacks- canada will take the role of poland.
why is there so much debate/commentary about binary distros nowadays? I've been using sorcery for 3 weeks, and I've never been more satisfied. I'm willing to wait an hour for a piece of software to be optimized for *my* particular hardware configuration, rather than waiting 20 minutes for downloading a pre-compiled binary. cast apt-get, anyone?
'When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.' -HST
You are really giving trolls a bad name. You should try for something a little more than the automatic -1.
I'm going out for my third date with my new girlfriend tomorrow night, so my woody is also nearing release.
Into Taco's mouth!
You don't need debian for that, just visit the slashdot editors at night.
I never release my woody, I keep a tight grasp on it at all times.
The current Slashdot moderation system is made by gay communists!
I use debian myself, but I find it extremely irritating in some respects. I do find that the most critical applications work fine. However, some of the maintainers are total retards. Like for instance, whoever is doing the windowmaker package has to be shot There are a countless number of bugs, and the maintainer hasn't done anything about them, like WPrefs is totally broken. However, it works perfectly fine when compiled straight from the regular source (same version). Another example, Fluxbox: you would expect to find a sample menu file included with the package, but NO! The maintainer thought it would be cool to just leave out the menu, and there is absolutely nothing except a menu with xterm, restart, quit. I search around, dpkg -L fluxbox, and there appears to be no sample menu included. Great work maintainer. I'm not using the stupid Debian menu system, because it is crap, and I want my own menus. Ah well...there goes another thing to hand compile myself. People always complain about Debian's installer, and I must say, I agree with them. People tell me, why is debian's installer so bitchy or difficult? Well, when I'm told to use tasksel in #debian, I tell them it's broken in woody/sid, in other words, it's useless, and they say nothing back to me. Then we have aptitude, dselect, deity, gnome-apt, etc, etc. dselect is extremely fucking annoying, it does totally random things sometimes, like install packages that are completed unrelated. Whatever happened to console-apt? _WHY_ do they think they should replace a good working utility with something else? That I don't understand. _WHY_ is it that a debian release only occurs every 20 million years? I would like to have a system that is functional, and not expect breakage all the time. _WHY_ is galeon not in testing? _WHY_ is there no XFree86 4.2.0 in woody/sid? It goes on and on. You always have troubles with Debian, and you only get excuses from people. "OH, well... the maintainer seems to have let a few bugs creep in to the package, and so uh......it won't make into testing until the maintainer gets a fucking brain, and fixes the package". Even when you get sid packages, it's never guaranteed to work in woody. Congrats to the idiot who recently released another broken mozilla in sid. Personally, I like Debian policy about some things, but I would like a functional system, and see more releases and a new fucking installer. Don't start giving me this bull shit about it being free software and I shouldn't be pissing my pants over it, other distributions do it well, Debian should do it too.
Installing kernel 2.2 as the default isn't a big issue. People didn't complain when Slackware 8 was released running 2.2. You still had the choice to use 2.4 if you wanted to.
Leaving the fact that your post adds up to nothing but trashtalk, I can give you some of the vision that you so severely lack. Think of debian as a mother distro. The vision is simple. Get as much into it, make it as stable as possible, and supply tools to maintain the mess. What else could a distro be about? Firing rockets? Waging wars? Get real! If you think that it is missing something, start your own "pet project"! What is the problem!
Postgresql 7.1 is available, and will ship with Woody. 6.3.2 is also available for backwards compatibility.
Any other shortcomings to point out?
-castlan
Did you even bother to click on the link so kindly provided in the previous post? It looks like you barely comprehended what Shiny said at all. Debian Stable is comparable to that of OpenBSD releases. You state that comparing the two is daft, after complaining about "a year and a half" of security updates. Or you could realise that perhaps the code has been audited for a year and a half.
.x releases later than 0 (e.g. 7.3) and Debian Stable is comparable to an OpenBSD Release.
The OpenBSD security audit, and all security audits, need to be performed on a stable code base. If you use new and untested code, then all of that auditing had been defeated. The OpenBSD audit only takes place on the "core" of OpenBSD, which means that you open yourself to insecurity if you activate the "ports" and other software which isn't considered part of OpenBSD proper - hence the claim of no remote explaits in the "Default install".
As for Debian, the security does not restrict itself to any "core" of packages - all included Free Software is valid, and their exploits "count". In spite of this, Shiny's link would have told you that in 2001, Debian GNU/Linux only had 1 remote exploit compared to OpenBSD's 7 remote exploits. So if you are planning on running Ports not included in OpenBSD core, Debian Stable arguably has better resistance to "remote holes".
This year and a half of debian auditing is evidently effective, contrary to your statement that "Debian has comparable security problems to any other" Linux distro. The same Security Focus report for 2001 claims that Debian Gnu/Linux had 14 total vulnerabilities, compared to Mandrakes 29 and Redhat's 40. "Sweetheart", you should realise that Debian Unstable is only "unstable" compared to Debian Stable. In Practice, I find that Debian Unstable is comparable to a Redhat x.0 release, Testing is comparable to most Redhat
-castlan
Yeah, and I guess Bill Clinton fills the role of Neville Chamberlain.
Is wanting to bang the crap out of Gillian Anderson a bad thing?
;-)
I have a conspiracy theory in my pants as we speak! Who wants in on it?
Rock-hard stability up till just prior to any new release of Woody, where a unstable process overflows and I dump core. What could be causing this? ;-)
c hi q.jpg.html
Wait...I think I have discovered the source
http://attrition.org/gallery/computing/tn/linux
this post shouldn't be +5 insightful. It should be a link off of the debian Homepage.
Maybe not, but it should at least be under the About link, or in an advocacy page. The salient point is that Debian, as an open organization, is fundamentally differnet than currency modulated corporations that release Linux. If somebody decides to spend 8 hours a day, 2 days a week working on FreeCiv for Debian, there is no resulting negative impact to the core packages such as Apt. A bug in Apt-get is orthoganal to work done on "extra" by hobbyists who don't take resources away from core maintainers.
As stated, bugs in the base system held up release. Bugs in 6 kazillion non-core packages are irrelevant to release.
-castlan
There is a subtle difference you might not realise. For Debian, the "later toys" are all that are added in newer releases. If you consider that bugs fixed in newer releases can be outweighed by bugs added with newer features, then you might see that there is a better way to fix bugs. When bugs in package foo3.2, the answer isn't to upgrade to foo3.3 - debian backports the fixes, resulting in foo3.2-x, where x is incremented for each new bugfixing release.
The upshot is that you cant compare a package's bugs by looking at the Debian version - that is what the changelog is for. The Debian version only indicates additional new features. If the package foo3.3 adds a new feature (toy) that you actually need, then foo3.2-x won't be sufficient. Debian doesn't just backport security fixes, bug fixes are backported too - but usually the emphasis is just on "important" major bugs, which includes security fixes.
To reciprocate, Red Hat has made significant improvements to their security with their new empasis on servers over desktops. In my experience, I still find that Red Hat is not yet comparable to Debian Stable for server security. Perhaps if the trend of profitability and server emphasis continues, then the advantages of commercial support will prevail and Red Hat will prove superior WRT security.
-castlan
This is informative? Its demonstrably incorrect for one thing, about both the FHS and how packages are handled by Alien. Problem: the people who read (and moderate) Debian stories are the ones interested in Debian to the point of excluding anything that seems counter to the direction of their distribution.
Oh well, I guess I was never going to get much of a chance.
I don't believe my post was flawless in any sense! Does that mean that it didn't have iny information worth reading? I am very dissapointed by your reaction here, especially the victim mentality. How did you not get a chance? Despite your fears to the contrary, you were not modded down. There was no summary judgement or execution by the Slashdot wing of the "Debian Community" You were hardly excluded, and just about every post with positive moderation was very fair and even, not rallying against any people expressing "counter-Debian" sentiments.
/. karma probably isn't as valuable as respect. :(
I really wish that I didn't see this post. Perhaps a negative moderation wouldn't have been uncalled for in this case, if it obscured this post. I suppose that is because I find
-castlan
But so what, it's not like I have a life at this very moment. So I've waited a business week, can you continue this conversation yet?
Any _real_ troll worth his salt would not surrender so easily. Any respectable conversant would realize when they were mistaken, and submit with honor. Only sneaky vermin such as yourself would scuttle off and pretend it was an act of generosity. That is not to say that you wouldn't be doing us all a favor by just going away, unfortunately, your kind tends to reinfest after the lights go out again.
So, step into the light. Are you a man, or are you a mouse? (Because you definitely aren't a troll. The billy goat would have easily kicked your ass.)