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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."
Debian is probably the best/most stable GNU/Linux available, and if a sarge ver can accomodate the world--the better we are for it. as a redhatian, turned debianite...I'd say we are on the verge of a major breakthrough...
We're like rats, in some experiment! -- George Costanza
are you talking about social contract or postponing it? how can postponing can be bad for debian desktop usage?
for the former, Debian is very strong all over the world, so if debian starts enforcing social contract, most developers will have to fallow Debian rules in order to penetrate to debian repository. finally, just for you information, new debian installer is much better than knoppix hd installer.
Debian is something different from most other Linux distributions - it is the absolute high ground, the place which could withstand a legal flood that would wash away any other distribution in existance. That is its function, in my view. There is Redhat/Fedora for pragmatic server use, Mandrake for latest and greatest and friendliest. Debian is adhering to a PRINCIPLE.
Most of us don't like adhering to principles - it really sucks because you have to give up things. In this case you give up convenience and non-free software being hidden safely in the background. For many people that price is too high. That's fine - use another distro! There are others who cater to that. Anyone using Debian has no business objecting to that philosophy - it is the primary reason Debian exists. People not contributing it have no voice at all, nor should they expect one. Think they're dumb for not being pragmatic? Guess how much that matters.
Debian is what happens when you take potential legal problems to heart and try to do what it takes to avoid them. I rather suspect that Debian ultimately wants there to be ZERO chance of any successful lawsuit about anything in the distribution, although I don't know if that is an explicit policy. That's hard, in our society. (What they probably REALLY want is no chance of a lawsuit being brought against them period, but the laws of the US at least don't allow that.)
Debian is about Freedom first, and software second. I see no problem with them releasing and then implimenting the policy changes, since there is not likely to be any increased risk compared to their current release. But if I'm wrong for whatever reason, they should ignore all critics and take whatever time they need to Do It Right. That is done too little nowadays, particularly in Free Software where theoretically Doing It Right is the motivation.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
I think you meant to say, "When Longhorn comes out, Sun will be worth no more than a chunk of coal" ;)
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.
This is good news. Alas, it will still have been too long when Sarge comes out.
I've heard others elsewhere suggest that there should be a server distro and a desktop distro in Debian. I like the idea personally.
Yes, I know about testing and unstable. I use unstable as my desktop. However, I'd like to have reasonable recent software without dealing with the constant moving target that is unstable. I'd like to see a desktop version that is updated every six to twelve months and that isn't held to the same standards the server sub-distro would held to. I think unstable updates too often. Stability is also a factor. Yes, unstable is relatively stable, but you have to keep close watch on incoming packages to make sure they don't break something.
This would also allow for docs to be made for the majority of Desktop Debian users who don't seem to be using stable.
Apt is "available" on other distros, but it's NOT the same apt that debian has.
Quite simply, because a deb gets through more QA before release, not to mention that the standard debian packages have the following advantages:
1) most debian packages manage config file changes by the user, and try to merge them(at least in unstable, not 100% sure about Sarge as of yet)
2) Debian's userid/tcp-ip ports management through dpkg catches more errors and allows better handling for special situations(like development boxes running several different kinds of web servers, for instance), that might just be my personal experience however(although the amount of work I had to perform to get 6 different types of webservers on a single debian box was lower than on any other distro I've tried by a large amount)
3) I take exception to your "What's the point of getting Debian stable, when it is so out of date?" statement. Until you replace stable with unstable, I read that as an oxymoron. Stable software was out of date last month, it is however, secure, usable, and third parties have had months to work out their alphas and beta phases, so now you can use it with your 12321322123112 machines with no worries that a bug hasn't been found YET. Not that Debian is IMMUNE to bugs, but up-to-date software IS rife with bugs(and if you're lucky, you don't wait too long for your fix). But with debian stable, that's confusing the security patches, with the next generation release, and that's bad juju.
The branch of Debian I notice you don't mention anywhere, is testing, which just might do what you think is Stable's job. For the rest of us, I'll go pray that some 3rd parties get a clue from Debian and start producing Stable branches of their software that break less often than their Unstable ones.
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