Slashdot Mirror
Debian May 1 Release Delayed
andrew writes "Anthony Towns, Debian's Release Manager, posted this message regarding the status of the expected May 1st release of Woody made reference to in this slashdot story. In short, he says: "So, it's April 30th (for most of the planet, anyway), which probably means folks are beginning to get mildly curious about whether woody'll actually be ready for release tomorrow. The answer is a definite 'kind-of'. Which is to say, 'no'.""
Yes, woody will become the new stable. Sid will remain unstable, and there'll be a new testing tree which hasn't been officially named yet (though the suggestion of "sarge" seems to have stuck in many developer's heads).
If you would have read all of the article, you would have noticed that they were also delaying the release because they didn't have their procedures ready yet to release security updates on woody and potato at the same time. I think we should applaud them for remembering how important security is (Maybe msoft should take note?).
Currently there are 47 release-critical bugs;
woody will presumably released when these bugs
are closed... so help debuging !
... as iso images.
People already running Debian/Sparc or Debian/Alpha will be able to update using apt-get.
The only problem will be that you can't install new machines using woody (but you can install potato and then do a apt-get dist-upgrade to get a recent OS).
Jo
--
Hi! I'm the infamous
Debian only uses a 2.2 kernel as the default, there's a number of different 2.4 kernels available as add-on packages. While this may be conservative, it _does_ give users a choice of either being conservative or going out on a limb and trying the still-not-entirely-stable 2.4 kernel.
Last time (2-3 weeks ago) I tested the Woody ISO:s you could choose a couple of different kernel-images for installation, three of them were 2.2.X images and one was with 2.4.18. I installed with 2.4.18 and it worked like a charm. I don't think there's anything wrong with the ability to choose. If you install it with the default 2.2 kernel you can apt-get the 2.4.18 packages and have that kernel installed instead.
Quite frankly, I fail to see what's news about it. There has never been a formal announcement of a May 1st release deadline, just a message in which the release manager went out on a limb: "So, to go out on a limb: Debian 3.0 (codenamed woody) will release on May 1st, 2002. Actually, as always, it'll release when it's ready: if we find that the software doesn't meet our expectations on April 30th, you'll find me on the ground writhing in pain with leaves, bark and wood all over the place [1].
(2) Because its a rather frivalous reason. Alot of other distro release x86 first and Sparc/Whatever later on. Why can't Debian do that?[1] I'm going out on a limb, remember."
Because Debian doesn't treat non-x86 users as second class citizens, and because the developers already have enough versions (stable, testing, unstable) of their packages to worry about without different archs having different versions.
Oh well I'm sure they will get it worked out in due time - until then I'm sure more and more people will begin to think of Debian as a dead distribution rather than as an active one.
Debian's release is going to be dead alright. Dead stable that is, which is exactly the goal of a Debian release. Anyone who gets a woody from a daily fix of "latest and greatest" versions can run woody (testing), or unstable and doesn't have to care about releases. Releases are for folks who require stability.
They really don't have anybody to blame but themselves I mean they are the only ones shipping a distro that still uses the 2.2 kernel. There are sound reasons for shipping with a 2.2 kernel as the default kernel; check the archives for the debian-boot and debian-cd lists. In any case, 2.4 kernels are supported, just use the "bf2.4" flavour of the installation system.These issues ware known at the time when the release date was given, see this post for mentions of some of the suspect packages.
Last time I tested 2.4.18 the USB support was severely broken (uhci doesn't work, usb-uhci lockups right when inserting the module (or the other way round)). It worked fine in 2.4.17... Another example: half a year ago the fresh installation of Mandrake took my data for a breakfast. The reason was USB combined with devfs, it was actually quite reproducible. Alan Cox said something along "we have a reason why we don't enable devfs in Red Hat" after I reported the problems on linux-kernel.
I don't know whether Debian also quality-assures the kernel and makes own patches as the commercial distros do. If they don't, their concerns about stability are quite valid.
The 2.2 default with the ability to choose seems like a wise solution right now.
Read the message from Anthony Towns. The only real problem is getting a mechanism in place to automatically build security updates for the 11 architectures supported by woody when the need arises. The architectures currently in potato are not a problem, just the additional 5 added since. The release will be delayed until this mechanism is in place.
This is a very sensible decision, and should be applauded.
Although Sid was a character in Toy Story, it also stands for Still In Development. Unstable will always keep the name Sid, because it is the one where new versions of actively developed software land first. You can read more about that in the Debian FAQ.
--
Promoting critical thinking since 1994.
This strikes me as really good news. Here is an outfit which takes my security seriously. This gives me a lot more confidence that I can rely on them to keep my machine running with no hassles to me. I have my apt-get sources file pointed at the stable distribution, and that description is going to continue to be accurate.
Thanks, Debian maintainers!
The reason why it works for conventional software projects is that the new people need time to tune in to the project, and existing people are tied up to handholding the newcomers. For Debian, this just does not apply.
You must not read debian-devel. New maintainers (and even people who are already official maintainers) ask basic, everyone-should-know-that-already questions there on a regular basis, tying up time for everyone else (even if it's just the time to discard the message). It's probably part of the reason that many people have unsubscribed from -devel. Not to mention the effort the rest of us have to put into reporting (and fixing!) bugs in their packages.
You could argue that it's less of an issue for Debian, but it's certainly not irrelevant.
Oh, and one more note: it was a member of the new-maintainer queue who was responsible for filing 80 frivolous release-critical bugs, simply because he didn't know better. (see debian-devel ) Bringing people up to speed involves educating them about the social aspects of Debian ("don't file tons of bugs at release time that we have to spend time ignoring") as well as the technical ("package maintainers can't change the priorities of their packages"), and people weem to have as much trouble grasping both.
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
experimental packages for debian and a short howto:
6 4
i'm using it right now actually. not the most stable thing in the world, but it's alright.
http://kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=14
my blog