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Debian 3.0 (Woody) May 1?
dex@ruunat noted that this morning, in a message to the debian-devel-announce mailing list, Anthony Towns, Debian's Release Manager, wrote: "I'm becoming increasingly confident in woody's release
readiness. So, to go out on a limb: Debian 3.0 (codenamed woody) will release on May 1st, 2002."
Congrats to all the debheads putting this thing together. I have a blank
CDR waiting ;)
Don't get me wrong -- this is a minor bitch about an otherwise great distro, and it's very much IMNSHO. I seem to be moving more and more to FreeBSD these days, but whenever I need or want Linux I always pick Debian. It's easy, it's stable, I absolutely love apt-get install/dist-upgrade, and and and...yeah, it's pretty much all great. I think I'll be waiting w/CD-R in hand, too.
(One other minor complaint, something I found on my box at work: why the hell does suidperl conflict with lynx? I had to install lynx from source, because Debian kept removing it when I installed suidperl for a webmail package I was testing. Anyone?)
Carousel is a lie!
I did a fresh install of Woody (debian/testing) on one of my machines this morning and it seems the pine and pico sources have disappeared from the packages list. Yes, I do use non-US and non-free packages so that can't be the problem.
For the rest, it runs quite well, but I still prefer debian/unstable because of the more recent packages.
gnome 2.0
kde 3.0
mozilla 1.0
apache 2.0
xfree86 4.2
kernel 2.4
it pisses me off that stable stuff doesn't get into debian. I mean, do they really think that mozilla-m18, which is in debian/stable, is more stable or usable than 1.0?! Or that gnome 1.0.55 is better than gnome-1.4.0. I'd rather see more attention being paid to getting new versions ready in stable than wasting time backporting fixes.
What the heck do user interfaces and packages have to do with an operating system? Why would any developer include packages when latest versions can be downloaded from the official web sites? Linux people, I'll never understand them.
Point for point:
In the case of the Debian Operating System, they are more significant than the fallacious significance of a kernel to the entirety of an OS. Some reasons include the desire for permanence and local reproducability of an instance of an OS enviroment, as well as potential scarcity of Web connectivity. The final statement is not a question. If you are referring to AI, then I am amazed that there are "Linux people" that are beyond the comprehension of the average HomoSapiens Technophilia. If you express puzzlement over the preferences exhibited by Linux-based OS bigots, then perhaps I can help point you in a direction to enligtenment. If youd rather remain Linux segregated, then go in peace; we are done here.
The confusion over the importance of UIs to OSes in my experience indicate an affinitty for Unix. Perhaps it would be a better world if an OS were naught but embedded daemons. There was a revolution, for better or worse, in which the "Personal Computer" lead the forefront, resulting in the sanctity of computer becoming debased. Now computing is a public phenomenon, and has at the very least benefitted from economies of scale. Your elitism against common "lusers" seems naive.
As for "packages", I can only assume that that you are a BSD fan. You already implied that you don't use a package independant Linux distribution, and I infer from your championing Web downloads that you aren't likely a commercial Unix weenie. Commercial Unices do tend to be use packaging systems in my experience. If I am correct in considering you a BSD fan, then statstically I can consider you a FreeBSD user.
Why exactly do you find Linux people inferior? Unless you are among the minority of kernel hackers, you likely find the userland inferior. UIs differences between BSD and Linux based "Unices" being as trivial as the are, the only deficiency apparent from your message is that of many packaging systems associated with Linux. In that case, May I suggest that you give Rock Linux which doesn't use packages, but rather compiles binaries from officail sources, much like FreeBSD ports. It isn't makefile based, but maybe spending time with it will enlighten you, or at least elucidate your perceptions of Linux's apparent shortcomings. Note that FreeBSD also offers packages, so your criticism isn't very valid as it stands. Perhaps you have more fruitful criticisms to offer. Most likely, IHBT, IHL, HAND.
In any case, Debian news items should contain a disclaimer that Debian is not Linux! Debian is a very modular and comprehensive system that offers Linux, just like it offers GNOME and Emacs. Debian needs GNU, but it doesn't need Linux, and there are plenty of Debian users that aren't "Linux people". Debian can just as easily look like VIM running over the Hird. I look forward to a stable Debian/NetBSD running on SGI MIPS R5K hardware, hopefully decades before Debian "Soldier" release 4.0.
-castlan
Debian is very "UNIX'y" in that IMHO it more resembles real System-V in it's look and feel, boot behavior, and compiler functionality. I really like it myself. I have messed with RedHat a bit and really don't care for it at all compared to Debian. I think Mandrake is more Debian-Like, and may be superior in its ease-of-setup for a total newbie, but once you start running on weird non x86 platforms Debian really shines because for all intents and purposes it appears to be and acts just like the x86 versions.
Clickety Click
Yes, I have heard that there are bf- prefixed images that have the 2.4 kernel and ReiserFS/ext3 support.
I have been patient with Debian. I have been persistent with Debian. I come bearing the news to Debian webmasters everywhere that the "bf-something Woody install" is not obvious. Not only in name obscurity when a Debian newbie would only know to look for 2.2 or 3.0 disc images, but also in placement on the website.
I have gone searching in vain for this bf-something install. I have looked in all of the obvious places on the website under such topics as "Getting Debian," "Debian on CD," and ""Download with FTP." This is bullshit. If this is everyone's definition of publically available, I must have missed that day of class. I even download some of those potentially nifty netinstall CD images in the hopes that they simply weren't labelled correctly with the magical bf- prefix.
Believe me, I have gone through a lot more effort than most casual visitors to the Debian site would have gone through. Unfortunately this is one area that Debian could learn from RedHat, Mandrake, SuSe, et al in that the others provide an iso image, you download it, you burn it, and off you go. If the newer install with the updated kernel works so well, why hasn't the old installer been mothballed? Why would the old installer be offered? If the new installer has problems that preclude its replacement of the old installer, then the appropriate answer to my previous post would have been "they're working on it and it should be ready when 3.0 is released."
Is it a work in progress? Sure! I acknowledge that. I am used to that. I have no illusions that any Linux distribution is without its rough edges. But how much effort is it really to have in the download area, clearer instructions for creating a up-to-date install disc? All I see is the same old crap that makes me jump through hoops and auto-detects nothing (another gripe that I will forget for now simply because I know my hardware well enought to answer the endless series of questions) while making use of journalled filesystems far from the simple case it should be.
By all means, prove me wrong. By all means, show me an obvious link that demonstrates me to be a dullard who cannot read a web page. I am not above humility. Otherwise I will assume that a clean and complete Debian install is bullshit, must first be excavated by a Debian veteran who knows how to find it, and/or is of no use to the general public. Debian may be a great distribution, but that's pointless if most people can't install easily without sacrificing popular features (like journalled filesystems) or hunting through mailing list archives without really knowing for what they search.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Was that "Woody" is such a major improvement over "Potato" that they felt it was justifiable to go to the next major version number; i.e. 3.0.
Clickety Click
Thank you for the info but once again I must point out that none of this information is apparent from the main web page (or its primary links). If individuals (like myself) are looking into a distribution's feature set, they will not see journalled filesystems as an option; They will see it as an option for Linux, but not Debian. What's the difference? With RedHat, for example, you can set up a kickstart disc to handle bulk, unattended installs of RedHat Linux (since v5 or something like that). Journalled filesystems are available by default in the RedHat installer and therefore are available to kickstart.
Now let's look at Debian: install must be manually performed for each workstation/server and an extra setup tax is imposed to get it working with a journalled filesystem (to beat a dead horse). Therefore Debian doesn't support journalled filesystems. Linux supports them and Debian tags along for the ride.
With regard to Ext3 being "safer." How do you figure? Have you come across more failures (catastrophic or otherwise) with ReiserFS or XFS vs. ext3? Is it safer because you can revert back to ext2? I have not seen the former and don't consider the latter to be an advantage or inherently safer. FWIW I used XFS for months on several boxes both at home and at work and never had any problems. Why did I even try XFS? Because it was easy to setup with SGI's custom installer for RedHat.
And as the AnonCoward mentioned, what does recompiling a kernel have to do with the quality of install programs or a person's choice of distribution? For the record, I can and have patched and recompiled my kernel. I can also program in C, C++, Perl, Java, and a few others. I am well versed in multi-threaded and multi-process programming as well as distributed programming. What are your credentials?
Now that the big-dick thing is out of the way, I feel it necessary to point out that Debian's big advantage over RedHat (aside from being completely volunteer-driven) is maintenance after install while RedHat is historically easier to install. Recently with utilities such as up2date and red-carpet, RedHat has become much easier to maintain. So what is Debian offering me other than a warm, fuzzy feeling? People in general don't start or stop using a particular distribution (or Linux or BSD) because of a warm, fuzzy feeling.
RedHat (and others) are finally catching up with maintenance. If this "if you can't recompile a kernel" crap continues to be spewed from the Debian community, you may find that it gets ignored not because of technical inferiority but because most people don't care about comparitive excellence as long as the job gets done. An easy install program is the first step in making sure you keep people's attention long enough to demonstrate technical excellence.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
And also almost doubling the number of architectures. Potato supports i386, m68k, alpha, sparc, arm, powerpc. Woody supports these plus mips, mipsel, hppa, s390, and ia64. Keeping 11 sets of binary packages in sync and relatively bug-free is not as easy as it may seem.
One might note that as AJ has said in the past, the long release cycle this time was due to some fundamental changes like the package pool and crypto-in-main. Still, I'll wait until woody+1 is released before I applaud the newfound efficiency of the release cycle. (:
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
No, the same issues can potentially occur on both debian and redhat.
Whether they do or not depends on the quality of the packaging job. It has very little to do with apt, dpkg, or rpm. The beauty of the Debian package archive is much much deeper than the fact that it is compatible with apt. The fact is that the Debian package collection is much better maintained than the equivalent RPM packages from a lot of sources, thanks largely to the Debian policy manual, and the fact that policy violations are considered serious bugs and usually fixed pretty fast.
A lot of people seem to think apt-get is a magic bullet. It's not. It's a very nice interface to a package archive which was already a work of art.
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README