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Debian Project Votes To Postpone Policy Changes
jonoxer writes "A little while ago members of the Debian project voted to make changes to the Social Contract. As previously reported on Slashdot, the end result looked likely to be a delay in the release of Sarge, the next Stable edition of Debian, until 2005. But on Saturday Debian developers voted to postpone the changes until after Sarge releases, effectively affirming that the changes need to be made but making a pragmatic decision to not let the next release be delayed as a result. The official voting page doesn't show the result yet, but it's been semi-officially announced."
Due to the elegance of Debian this sort of thing is completely painless. I've personally done this on several machines when "woody" became "stable". Its easy to do because when "testing" finally becomes "stable" all that changes in the archive is that symlinks all change.
Currently:
testing -> sarge
stable -> woody
After the release:
stable -> sarge.
As an end user you have the option of tracking either by "testing/stable" or "woody/sarge". To do what you want should track "sarge" rather than "testing". The best method is to use "real names" in your /etc/apt/sources.list. That is, make all occurances of "testing" (or "sarge") all read as "sarge". This way you won't even need to know when "sarge" becomes "stable", all that will happen is your updates will suddenly become less frequent and all updates will be for security.
Elivs
PS- sorry about tpyos and poor formating I having a busy day.
You more or less nailed it. See, Debian themselves doesn't distribute material. Debian's ftp-masters group does; the ISPs who donate very large amounts of bandwidth and hosting for all of Debian's servers. In exchange, Debian gives then a best-effort to verify that there is and will never be a problem with any of the material that Debian asks its generous donors to redistribute.
The ftp-masters group is politically very strong. They can overrule any Debian Developer's decision, the Technical Committee, or even the Project Leader himself. They are where the rubber meets the road and as such, their decisions on what packages they distribute--and how--are final. The only recourse for Debian is to reject that server and remove them from the list of official servers and mirrors.
The primary purpose of debian-legal is to service the ftp-masters. Because without distributors, Debian can't reach any audience.
reading through these comments i wonder: When will people learn that debian/stable is not contain the latest and greatest software?? "stable" in terms of debian the distro means that no major amounts of software are changed, it only gets security updates. the packages in the stable tree aren't changed, so therefore it's stable.
if you want the latest and greatest software, run debian/unstable. "unstable" doesn't mean that the software itself is unstable, it's just that the packages in the unstable tree are changed/updated often, hence calling it "unstable". debian unstable contains all the goodies that are in the latest versions of other distros, like kde 3.2, gnome 2.6, etc, etc.....
also, yes, all the packages in sarge may fill 14 cds, but you don't need to download all of them. all you need to get is the net-installer iso (around 100 MB) and then download only what you want. so set up the base system with the net-install cd, then the latest versions of whatever you want are just an apt-get away.
sorry for the rant, but people unfamiliar with debian are often misinformed or make unfair assertions.
The installer was redesigned in Sarge, and should be much easier to use.
And you don't have to download all 14 CDs: only do so if you a) have a penchant for pain or b) are obsessive with hard copies of things.
You only need the first CD to have a working stable system, and Debian sorts its packages based on popularity, so most likely, you'll find what you need within the first 4 CDs.
You could also just use apt-get and an http or ftp source, but I guess that would be too convenient.
Alright, this really shits me.
/etc/apt/sources.list! It's as easy as that. apt-get update, followed by apt-get -t experimental gcc-3.4. DONE.
Exactly WHAT part of Debian is out of date? It's not the packages, that's for sure.
I use Debian unstable. Do you actually know what the "unstable" part means? It means that the contents of the "unstable" packages are probably still changing! Does that make it any less usable? When you're admining 20 servers, you probably don't want your PostgreSQL database server to suddenly become incompatible with your data due to a format change. (aside: debian upgrade scripts can try to automagically dump/re-import your old database for you)
But compared to a desktop OS like Fedora? NO! Debian unstable is absolutely FINE for desktop usage, despite the "unstable" label.
So why is it called "unstable"?
It may be because upstream is still changing fundamental parts of the app, such as when the new exim4 (at the time) decided to split the config files up. You can't put that in "stable" can you?
Or it may be because the Debian package maintainers haven't figured out the best way to package something according to Debian policy, like when the vim package suddenly decided to break into multiple packages separating out arch-independant/doc related stuff to avoid duplicating data on the mirrors.
I'm sure there are better examples, but the point is, when comparing Debian vs DesktopLinuxOS like Fedora, compare Debian Unstable.
If you do, you will find that package updates are plenty and timely. I think the kernel images are barely even a week behind the kernel.org releases. Gnome 2.6 took a while, about TWO WHOLE FRIGGING WEEKS. How much faster do you want?
If, for example, you want the latest GCC 3.4 which I'm guessing isn't considered "ready" to replace GCC-3.3 as the default compiler, then just add an experimental source in your
Geez, why after all this time do people still not GET Debian.... it's enough to make somebody ANGRY
Many people using debian do not understand what the labels stable, testing and unstable mean.
Debian stable ist called stable, because the packages are only replaced in order to fix security flaws. The security patches are manually backported by the debian security team. This concept assures that one can configure a system and handcoded scripts will not break until a new version of debian stable is released (every 2-3 years!).
So stable has the meaning that one can install a system, do automatic daily security updates and forget about it until the next version comes.
Debian unstable gets updated packages every day. So if you would like to have current software you could chose debian unstable. Unstable does not get security fixes. This isn't too bad, because the original software mainainers patch their software and this will get into debian unstable pretty soon.
Than there is debian testing which is meant to be the testing system before the release of the next version of debian stable. It does not get security patches. It sometimes does not get timely package updates.
If you want a system which is stable in the way, that the software does not have many bugs, you should NOT use debian stable, but UNSTABLE!!! This is because non-security-bugs are not patched in debian stable, but in debian unstable, as new versions arrive there. A good example is mozilla: In debian stable, the current version is 1.0.0! It did not even get security fixes as this would have meant too much work! In debian unstable the current version of mozilla is 1.7. Mozilla 1.7 definetely crashes less often than Mozilla 1.0.0!
Do not use debian testing for other reasons than testing the next version of debian stable! Testing has sometimes outdated software AND does not get security patches. This combines the bad features of stable and unstable!
So if you want a system that almost never changes, because you do not have the time to reconfigure your system often, use debian stable. In all other cases, use debian unstable. It is not less secure. In some cases, like mozilla, it is MORE SECURE! Never use debian testing, except you want to help with testing at the debian community.
Please do not suggest that debian stable has less bugs than debian testing which has less bugs than debian unstable. Almost the opposite is true!
Every time there is a Slashdot story about a Debian vote, someone plugs Instant Runoff. Debian has not, does not, and will not ever use Instant Runoff. Instant Runoff suffers from major flaws, and its only real effect is to allow symbolic votes for compromise candidates while effectively taking them out of the running. The primary difference between Condorcet and IRV is that IRV completely ignores everything but your top choice, until that choice is eliminated. This means that with IRV, if you have a favorite third party as well as a preference between the two primary parties, such as (Libertarian,Republican,Democrat) or (Green,Democrat,Republican), you are hurting the ability for your second choice to win over your third choice, because that preference is completely ignored until your first choice loses. This has two effects: when your first choice is weak, your vote for them is meaningless; when your first choice is strong, but not strong enough to actually win, your first choice could eliminate your second choice (Libertarian beating Republican, or Green beating Democrat), and then your last choice would win (Democrat beating Libertarian, or Republican beating Green), completely ignoring one of your preferences. This means that the only way in an IRV system to successfully express a preference in the two-party race is to rank one of the two parties first, which is the problem we have now.
To quote electionmethods.org:
Instant Runoff also has another major problem: results cannot be tabulated locally. In all good voting systems, if you tally the votes from one county, tally the votes from another county, and add the totals, then the results will be the same as if you had tallied all the votes together. With our current "plurality" system, the tally is an array of length N (for N candidates). With Condorcet, the tally is an NxN matrix. With IRV, however, one cannot just keep tallies, because a ballot is not equivalent to a set of pairwise votes; instead, one must either use a tally of size N! (one for each possible order), or just track every single ballot. This makes IRV highly impractical as well as being technically inferior to just about every other system.
Debian uses the much better Condorcet voting system. Like IRV, Condorcet gathers a ranked list of candidates from each voter. However, Condorcet looks at _all_ of your preferences at the same time. It treats the voting process like a set of two-candidate elections between every possible pair of candidates. This means that in a three-candidate election (Rep/Dem/Lib, for example), a vote for (Lib,Rep,De