Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Debian Aims For September Release Date

Posted by michael on from the slow-and-steady-wins-the-race dept.

An anonymous submitter writes "Debian Planet has a good discussion of the most recent release update from the new Debian release managers. The most interesting point is the current hard freeze of base+standard and an optimistic but doable release date in September."

6 of 282 comments (clear)

  1. Debian... by dhakbar · · Score: 5, Insightful

    As always, those of you who whine about Debian being out of date have probably never looked at the packages available in unstable and testing. Debian is a very fine distro for even desktop use.

    1. Re:Debian... by Erwos · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "As always, those of you who whine about Debian being out of date have probably never looked at the packages available in unstable and testing."

      And for those of us who've used Debian before, we can tell you that, every so often, unstable just breaks. It's not like it's planned, but the fact is, with so many package maintainers, something's bound to go wrong - and it usually does every few months. At that point, you've got to go and uninstall and reinstall packages to make dpkg not complain about weird circular dependency problems - an irony for a distribution that so many claim is the answer to "dependency hell".

      You can't test to see how reliable Debian Unstable is, either. I mean, "Debian unstable works great for me" is kind of confusing as a statement. Did it work right a month ago? How about 36 days ago? 67 days ago? That is to say, it's impossible to actually be sure that it's working right any particular day because Debian unstable is constantly changing. Debian stable, SuSE, and RedHat simply don't have this problem, and it's why many people are not enamored of running Debian off the unstable packages repository.

      Thus, Debian unstable is simply _not_ what you want for reliable updating and pain-free maintenance. Debian is many great things, but realize that it has big faults once you move out of stable. It pisses me off to no end when people proclaim Debian to be the most stable (in reference to the stable branch) and most up-to-date (in reference to unstable). It's the most stable OR the most up-to-date, not both.

      Just thought I'd get that off my chest. I'm a big Debian proponent, but I'm not going to lie about what's going on with it.

      -Erwos

      --
      Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
  2. That's really good... by Pecisk · · Score: 4, Insightful

    With all that flame war nonsense about communication (which sucks unfortunately in Debian) and AMD64 inclusion in Sarge, it's great that someone has cleared mind and moved forward. No offence to Debian AMD64 guys, thought. But they should at least understand that Sarge release already TOO late.

    --
    user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
  3. eh? by theantix · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I think Debian is a fine project, but to be fair you have to admit that the unstable and testing distributions break far too often to use on a production machine. Of course, I've heard that Lindows^H^H^H^Hare and Xandros do a fine job of producing a quality stable release from those packages, but that's not really the same as pure Debian. Using pure Debian is great if you like to tinker and don't mind when things stop working all of a sudden. But for a primary desktop machine it is too unstable and just doesn't cut it for me anymore since I fully ditched mswindows and rely on my linux installation for everyday work.

    This isn't to say that Debian sucks -- it really doesn't suck at all and I love using stable for servers. It's just not a "fine desktop" for people who just want to get work or play done without applications suddenly failing on them.

    --
    501 Not Implemented
  4. Re:Why this obession with release dates? by MBAFK · · Score: 5, Insightful

    We use Debian on our production kit. I would not like to 'chase' versions with apt daily, weekly or monthly. To us having a stable set of boxes is extremely important, an official release is a big deal to us and the long term plans for our servers are based on these releases.

    I used to do apt-get dist-upgrade all the time on my workstation but it is not acceptable for some computers.

  5. HOWTO use Debian Sid by hummassa · · Score: 4, Insightful

    1. don't try to track sid every single day.
    1(a). this means: apt-get upgrade if and only if there is a serious vulnerability; optionally, once a week, preferably once a month.
    2. USE apt-listbugs.
    2(a). this means: READ the fscking bugs. take a special look in those marked by apt-listbugs with , but DO read all of them. in any apt-get dist-upgrade, I get at most 30 bugs.
    3. USE apt-listchanges.
    3(a). yes, you know the drill. READ the changes. SEARCH for changed functionality, especially in packages you tinkered with the config.

    1+2+3 == NEVER breaking the machine.

    --
    It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048