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."

Comments

List of all the Release Critical bugs

[arnoroefs2000]

List of all the Release Critical bugs (15 feb. 2002)

Re:List of all the Release Critical bugs

[shallot]

An up to date list of the release critical bugs, the one from which that report you linked to is generated, is available at

http://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/

foo

[Anthony Boyd]

Expected major upgrades, by the time woody releases, include GLibC 2.2, GCC 3.0, XFree86 4.1 and Perl 5.6. Linux kernel 2.4 is judged not to be mature enough to be a default for most architectures at this time, but you can install a 2.4 kernel from Debian after completing your installation. It's also likely that the debconf package will be used in nearly all the packages which need to prompt in the maintainer scripts.

I think Debian needs a 2.4 kernel as the default if Debian is going to shake its image as hopelessly outdated.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.

Re:foo

[Daniel]

For instance, even now you can apt-get up-to-date packages

That's talking about an entirely different thing: to install up-to-date packages, you have to put unstable (or testing) in sources.list, and deal with the issues that arise from that.

The 2.4 kernels will be *in woody*, distributed on woody CDs, and available in the same way as the rest of the woody software. They just weren't planned to be the default kernel, although I've also heard rumors that some install disks are being built around 2.4.

Daniel

Re:Kernel version?

[Shiny Metal S.]

2.2.20 AFAIK. It's a rock solid kernel.

Sorry, you can use 2.2.20 or 2.4.13 2.4.14, 2.4.16 and 2.4.17.
See the list of base packages.
(and always you can build your own kernel of course)

Re:fallback to unstable hack (typo correction)

[pmineiro]

damn, i posted this before but i misspelled preferences, so to be clear:
if you have a recent version of apt, and you put the following lines into /etc/apt/preferences 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

Re:About Time

[reynaert]

Just to be clear, OpenSSH 3.0.2 is included in Woody (and has been for some time).

/etc/apt/source.list anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Fighting the /. effect. Do not mod up.

[Daniel]

I simply wonder why you would want 6 kazillion packages in the distrib when it could simply be the base system.

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 /. headlines, you will have only a narrow and sensationalized view of matters.

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