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Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 Released
emissary47 writes "The Debian Project is pleased to announce the release of Debian GNU/Linux version 3.0. Debian GNU/Linux is a free operating system, which now supports a total of eleven processor architectures, includes KDE and GNOME desktop environments, features cryptographic software, is compatible with the FHS v2.2 and supports software developed for the LSB. The Release Notes are available here."
It's deh, like Deborah.
Debian 3.0 Woody comes with KDE 2 and XFree86 4.1 while 3 and 4.2 are out respectively. This is a bit sad, seeing that even CygWin and FreeBSD have more up-to-date versions in their releases.
Release processes do take time, and Debian woody's started long before KDE3 or XFree86 4.2 were released. It is not the policy of the Debian team to drop everything mid-release-prep and package the latest version of some package, regardless of how significant it may be. If that was the case, releases would take a great deal more time.
If you want to see the process go faster, feel free to step up and help out.
Since you're posting this sort of troll, you probably already know the truth of things, but in case you don't, I'll fill you in.
Debian GNU/Linux releases for 11 architectures, and aims to stable on all of them. Most distros concentrate on one or two (gentoo is no exception), and those one or two tend to be x86 and if you're lucky PPC. They also tend to cater to people that are in the latest-greatest-p6-123123MHz-gamer crowd.
It's important to realize that with Debian, users of non-standard architectures are not second class citizens like they are on other distros. If I install Debian Stable on a machine that Debian claims to support, I can be relatively sure that the system will run smoothly and without issue. This is much more than any other distro out there can say.
When you say that XF4.2 and KDE3 are stable, you mean they are stable on the intel architecture, something no one debates. But being stable on intel is useless to the Debian release crew if it doesn't compile on Alpha, SPARC, HPPA, and any of the other supported architectures.
Another thing that non-Debian users seem to have a very hard time with is the notion of Stable, Testing, and Unstable. When you use some other linux distro, a release is very important because the lack of a central repository and coordination of packages makes partial upgrades a royal pain in the butt. This is fondly called RPM hell. Actually, it has nothing to do with the RPM package format, which isn't really that much worse than the DEB format, but rather the way APT handles package dependencies and such.
A Debian user can keep his system up to date over a reasonable net connection, and I'd venture that most desktop debian users don't much care when something releases, because they don't track stable. Because stable needs to be stable on 11 architectures, it is nearly always behind -- but it's as stable as a rock. If you run x86 and want the lastest version of everything, stable is not for you. In that case, it doesn't matter when Debian releases.
If you're a newbie, track testing, because it's more stable than unstable but has a lot of pretty new packages. If you're adventurous and want the bleeding edge, track unstable. Despite its name, it's still more stable than say, Mandrake.
Hopefully, you're less ignorant now than you were before. If not, then you're beyond help.
Cygwin is only for architectures that Windows supports, which also happens to be the most common, so of course it isnt a big deal to release early.
Just realize that Debian's XFree86 team does much more than package it and distribute. They are the ones porting it over, not RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE, Cygwin and FreeBSD.
Sorry if Debian doesn't fit your time frame, its not meant to fit anyones. It's meant to be done when its done, and thats the beauty in it. If you can't deal with that, either use unstable or use another distro.
P.S. - Unstable isn't as dangerous as people make it out to be. My unstable box has been running for over 250 days, and I update every day or two. If that is considered 'very risky' then what does that say about other distro's who claim to be stable? So don't say that we just use unstable as an excuse for slow package releases.
I am running KDE 3.0.2 and X4.2 and running Debian unstable, btw :)
Big thanks goes out to the Debian developer's, congratulations!!!!
-topside
What? You're surprised that Debian developers and users are geeks? What planet did you say you came from again? :)
In any case, note that the Debian developers finished in time to head off to the movies/restaurants/clubs (especially those of us on the left coast). It's the Debian users who are now faced with confronting their true geek natures.
GNU is GNU, I wouldnt call any of it stolen.
does anyone know of any other mayor GNU-dist that does HURD?
c0w goes moo.
The release notes for x86 indicate that the thing
;)
ships with 2.2.20, with an optional 2.4.x for the bleeding-edgers, with (as explanation) a catty remark about the Debian developers not considering 2.4 a 'stable' branch.
Admittedly, I prefer Debian for the work that I do mainly because of the stability. But really -- 2.4 has been utterly reliable since ~2.4.14. Isn't this just a little paranoid? C'mon, folks, the thing is solid! I mean, the VM subsystem hasn't been completely re-written in *months*!
- undoware.ca
It's not like the Debian people are writing the programs. All they are doing is...
Did I just hear someone volunteer to help with the next Debian release?
The dogcow says "Moof!"
A faster release process is required if we expect newbies (Debian newbies -- not Linux newbies) to install Debian and have a fairly up-to-date set of packages. Although testing is fairly stable, it is still possible to run into the odd packaging problem, which newbies could have a hard time figuring out. Plus the fact that testing has a serious security problem (security updates won't show up until about two weeks after they are packaged since they have to go through unstable first). But that's just my opinion.
Hurd and *BSD ports. (Hopefully both will be in sarge, though I'm not too confident about Hurd being there on time.) There are also rumors of a Win32 port, although there doesn't seem to be much work being done on that front. Then there's work on using Progeny's Debian installer as a user-friendly alternative/replacement to Debian's default installer. And they'll probably add a few more architectures to the mix too.
To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three persons, two of them absent.
Debian 3.0 Woody comes with KDE 2 and XFree86 4.1 while 3 and 4.2 are out respectively.
Big deal. Pretty soon, both the XFree86 and the KDE 3 situations will be rectified. So we've had to wait a bit longer. It's well worth it in my opinion since Debian makes installation and upgrade of all this software incredibly easy compared to ANY other operating system. If you want to go out and use something inferior, that's your own business. Eventually Debian gets current and once it leaps these major release hurdles, they stay current.
This is a bit sad, seeing that even CygWin and FreeBSD have more up-to-date versions in their releases. Just think of how much effort it took Cygwin to port the packages to Windows before packaging them, for example -- yet despite this their releases are far more timely.
The *BSD ports system is basically a nice way of organizing sources for programs. Very little effort is needed to add something to the system (this includes figuring out deps). So, it's not that big of a deal to see Debian lag behind BSD. Try again.
As for Cygwin, I'm trying to imagine how hard it is. Well, it just isn't. In the past few days, I've installed a lot of programs from source on Cygwin at work. None of them ever complained about not being in a real "unix" environment. Your statement clearly indicates that you've missed the whole point of Cygwin. Cygwin is designed such that it is not supposed to be hard to make packages of "unix" software for it. Duh.
The Debian packagers claim that there is a lot of intricacy involved in the packaging, and i'm sure there is, but I don't buy that people should have to use older software with known bugs, several months after the upstream authors have released their software.
Yes, it is infact intricate. Debian supports 11 platforms. Some are little endian, other big. Some are CISC, others MIPS. Some software (serpent cipher for example) only work on machines with certain endianness. As a result, this makes a dependency nightmare for the package maintainers. I'd like to see anyone else take on the job the Debian people have assumed and do 10% the quality of work.
As for using older software... well, fine, don't buy it then. It's well known in the IT world that you stick with the tried and true until the bleeding edge stops bleeding. A lot of shops know better than to jump right onto the latest version bandwagon because doing so destroys a potential resource of great value: watching other people fail in doing so. Knowing what your problems are when using software is better than using software and not knowing what problems you'll have. Again, duh.
Why bother.
And as we all know (except for the magazines) the branches of debian are like this compared to other distros:
Now all that's left to say is, I wonder what they'll do when then run out of Toy Story characters to name the releases after? Or if they switch, what they'll switch to?
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
yr comment shows that you do not understand th nature of a voluntary project
work in a voluntary project is only done voluntarily - no-one points to another person and orders them to do this or that
hence th fact that th release notes have been translated into catalan indicates that there was someone happy to do this task - a task which does benefit a community, albeit a rather small one
i would imagine that german and chinese translations will also appear quite soon - however this again will be done voluntarily, and not by someone ordering someone else to do it
i would also imagine that yr use of th word 'silly' is offensive to th person who did th catalan translation and who is providing real benefit to a section of th community however insignificant you consider it to be - perhaps you might like to contribute yrself rather than simply being irritatingly critical of work that has been voluntarily performed.
My experience matches yours, mostly, but a couple of observations:
.deb system didn't seem to know about it (it's good enlightenment was basically a leaf program)... it's not the same.
One: "Inordinate amount of time" is too vague. An 'inordinate' amount of CPU time is more-or-less irrelevant to me. emerge is faster then trying to deal with a src deb.
Two: On that vein, downloading and compiling a source deb was non-trivial when I did it for enlightenment. Fiddly bits here, fiddly bits there, once installed the
I have a little underpowered laptop that I have had both Gentoo and Debian on. Great performance gains were obtained in both by compiling enlightenment with a lot of optimizations. The speed's about the same, but guess which was 'fire and forget' and which was 'fiddle with it for a couple of hours'?
I happily trade hours of my CPU time for minutes of my time. I can tell you which is more valuable to me in this era of desktop supercomputers.
Your points are valid, but for many of us, the priorities say Gentoo's a good deal overall. (I've started taking to selectively setting CFLAG and CXXFLAG settings on packages I think will benefit, without getting too anal about it. Non-optimized compiling is often 3-5x faster, even for just -march=i686 -O3 -pipe.) Perhaps not to you... but that's why we have dozens of major distros.