Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
All I can say is this: I *seriously* hope we're using at least the 2.0 kernel.
use apt-get...
~shiny
WILL HACK FOR $$$
You should've installed Woody then. Most of the time you have three versions to choose from: stable, testing/frozen and unstable. When you need a system which will not ever crash after years of heavy load, use stable. If you want more decent software, use testing. If you want the newest versions of software from yesterday, use unstable. It's Good Thing because you have a choice, so don't complain that you're not forced to use the latest untested software, it's up to you. And remember that unstable Debian is usually more stable than any other distro.
~shiny
WILL HACK FOR $$$
List of all the Release Critical bugs (15 feb. 2002)
I think Debian needs a 2.4 kernel as the default if Debian is going to shake its image as hopelessly outdated.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 &
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.
Just to be clear, OpenSSH 3.0.2 is included in Woody (and has been for some time).
but I am compelled to share with everyone how I misread the caption...
All but three RC base bugs are belong to us.
:(
-9mm-
So wait, you claim that you have no problem rolling your own packages, but you do have a problem installing Debian? Do you happen to be an Enron CEO?
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?
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.
Yeah, I think Linus said this about 2.4.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
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.
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.
~shiny
WILL HACK FOR $$$
- Debian stable version (today it's Potato),
- Debian testing version (Woody) and
- Debian unstable version (Sid).
Have you read The Myth of Open Source Security Revisited ? That means that you won't see the latest untested toys in Debian stable, like you won't see them in OpenBSD. There is no point in arguing that Debian stable doesn't have the newest software, because if you want to run the newest (which also means untested) software, that means you don't want Debian stable. You should use one of the other available versions, unstable or testing. I usually find the testing version the best for my own use, but I still use stable Potato on few mission critical machines, which have never disappointed me so far.~shiny
WILL HACK FOR $$$
Why is it that every time there is a release announcement, this same lame joke gets modded up?
Blah...
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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
Yes, sort of.
:)
If you have a package installed which is removed from testing, it will still be installed on your personal machine. ajt won't come to your house and wipe it from your disk
But you won't get upgrades from apt (unless you have it set to download from unstable or the new testing) until or unless the package is placed back into the archive.
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
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.
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!
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.
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!
Oh, it wasn't you personally, it's more just the repetitiveness of it all. :)
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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!
FUD!! Only one developer quit.
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!
Testing is the release candidate; that is its purpose. (AIUI, anyway)
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
Whether or not this is a bug or a feature, I won't say.
Have you filed bug reports? Dependencies are handled automatically by the build scripts, so it's possible the maintainers haven't noticed those errors.
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
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.
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
:)
:)
:)
To be fair, there's little new in the idea, although I'd like to think that our implementation is somewhat more advanced
But in reading the posts here, it seems that more people are concerned with the newest fad feature over stability
Because of some unusual situations within the Linux software world, potato's age is more critical than it might otherwise be. Many very useful software packages have been created or have come to maturity in the last year and a half. For instance, the web browser I'm typing this into (galeon) did not exist when potato was released...at least, not in any usable form.
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.
I suspect that people who want to use mysql for authentication might differ with you on that
In any event, this dependency seems to have been removed in unstable.
Similarly, I was very happy with emacs until they make a package requirement for XFree86 in order to install emacs.
Ok, you win. You've completely stumped me here. I cannot find an emacs package that depends on an X server. Could you post the control information for that package here so I can put together a bug report?
Oh, in case this is it, depending on xlibs isn't a bug -- the X support in emacs is very useful, and it can't be enabled without this. Having xlibs installed will do nothing to you if you don't install the rest of X.
Now some random general comments:
Things that one person considers bloat are usually a feature request from another person.
Some maintainers compile their package dozens of times, once for each useful combination of compilation options...this lets you be selective about what options you have installed, but tends to (IMO) bloat the archive and package list, and make things confusing for the user. Striking a balance is very difficult, and the only certain thing is that some people will be upset no matter what we do
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
Unfortunately, the data for Debian which leads to this conclusion is completely wrong. Important security holes were simply ignored when the statistics was prepared (for example, the OpenSSH remote root hole is missing).
It is the reference to xfree86-common that is the problem
As I explained in private mail before I checked here, xfree86-common is just a bunch of documentation and skeleton files to support X clients and servers. It doesn't install any programs or configuration, and it doesn't start an X server.
It is being pulled in because xlibs now depends on it, not because of emacs; it is far less bloated than emacs itself; and the X maintainer has a history of making good decisions about his packages, so I presume he did this for a sound reason unless I hear otherwise.
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
Heh. Save your bug reports to a file and email them to me. I'll be happy to file the reports on your behalf.
Debian is not Free Software. Ever since they announced their intention to go completely closed source, developers have been flocking away in droves.
:)
Wow, April Fool's Day came early this year
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
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.
You say "Debian is not Free Software" and then call this guy ignorant?
You sir, are a class AA fuckwit.
I find Testing, to be the most stable Linux distro I have ever used, besides Stable.
At best, I guess I could give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you to just be a troll. PS, this is a compliment.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?