Debian Aims For September Release Date
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."
...that features the new 2.0 kernel?
As always, those of you who whine about Debian being out of date have probably never looked at the packages available in unstable and testing.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.
Isn't that one of the signs of the Apocalypse?
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
five oh three
we've seen thee a lot two odd numbers sandwiching naught
seeing a good olde friend
such a grand time
a prime, a zero, another prime
we hope slashdot
doesn't fix their site
so we may enjoy you every night
grub
Trolling is a art,
Okay, this is a Debian thread, you all know the drill. Everybody who wants to make a crack about Debian packages being at least twenty years old by the time they are released form a line to the right.
Zealotous supporters of other Linux distributions over by the wall. If you have no clue how apt works but still want to say that rpm/emerge/tar is far superior, just raise your hand when we call on you.
If you think you're being pretty darn rebelious by railing against the use of "GNU/Linux", then stand over by the wading pool. We'll get to you once the grown-ups have had their say.
BSD supporters can congregate near the exit. We've heard some rumours about you and I want to make sure you have a clear path to the ambulance in case anything happens.
Everyone who thinks Yggdrasil is the one and only true distribution, there's a special thread for you over in the cafeteria.
It's beta 4 of Sarge but I think it lets you throw on Woody as well. Netinstalls are good obviously because it's a small DL, you end up DLing only what you need, and what you do download is fresh regardless of when you burnt the CD.
Also, I'm batting a thousand with this installer as far as getting X video working without a hitch... I can't say that for the sound server, but as they say, if you're interested in sound, you shouldn't be running Debian. :)
Sometimes. Other times, they simply "backport" bug fixes to older versions.
do they inform the original authors of a problem?
Gentoo always sends its fixes upstream when appropriate. I would imagine Debian does the same.
if so, what effects on code ownership does this have - does the Debian team become co-author?
Depends on the author of the original code and the patch. Some will require you to assign copyright to them, others don't really care because it's all GPL'd anyway.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
Did they specify the year?
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
There are ony SOO many toy story characters, after this there going to have to start naming them after the etch-a-sketch, piggy bank, etc. on the other hand.. there have been 2 sequals since woody was released.
Sarge released... Check
Slashdot works better with Internet Explorer than with Firefox... Check
Walls bleeding...Check.
Yup, it's the End Times.
Best Slashdot Co
To really see the debian process at work one would need to be a member of one of the many mailing lists (depending on what your interests are) and/or participate in the IRC meetings or regular IRC chatrooms for many debian-based or debian-specific pieces of software.
For instance, I usually hang out in the #debian-desktop channel, and i'm subscribe to the debian-gtk-gnome mailing lists. In there I get to help others fix their problems, help developers find bugs and re-do packages, etc.. etc... Usually all bugs reported to the bugs.debian.org bug repository or to the mailing list get sent upstream.
After years of distro-hopping from various Linux distributions, I find Debian to be the one that gives me the most confidence in all senses: from a security point of view, from a non-vendor "lock-in" point of view, and even more importantly from a stability point of view.
Surprisingly enough, I run debian "unstable" as my main workstation at work and at home, and I rarely see a piece of software that breaks (this is despite the fact that I have become an apt-get junkie! Which means that I usually update as soon as there is some new piece of code added to the "unstable" branch).
The future version of Debian stable, code named "Sarge", is a very very solid distro as it is at this moment. I have started to exclusively install this distro on friend's and family's desktops as they move away from other OSes and welcome the Linux beauty into their lives. Out of 20 or so "upgrades" i have done, only one has gone back to the dark side after a month or so using it. Usually after they get to use a very well configured (and stable) desktop based on Debian, they never go back.
My hope is that Sarge becomes a rock-solid, easy to install, modern OS a la Mandrake or Xandros, but totally royalty free. And so far I believe that very goal has been achieve, with a few things missing here and there that might be addressed in the near future. (Like the need for a GUI to the installer, and a way to manage drivers for hardware from a GUI).
This sig can be distributed under the LGPL license
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.
Huh? Debian unstable doesn't break often at all. In fact it hasn't broken anything for me in more than 6 months, and I do it at least weekly. Lower frequency updates obviously break things even less frequently. I have other Operating Systems break far more often when tinkering with installed packages or upgrading stuff.
To recap its stable then testing and finally unstable.
;-))
I think they could solve their name problems if they would rename everything like this:
Stable => Debian Server
Testing => Debian Desktop
Unstable => Debian Windows
Each name clearly denoting the level of stability for that branch.
(Let the flame wars begin
--Phillip
Can you say BIRTH TAX
The following excerpt is from an interview at http://www.pctechtalk.com/view.php?id=3230. It seems people are not going to be able to bitch about the outdated releases for too much longer.
technobeast: Why is the latest stable version of Debian outdated? And why is this idea with several releases? Any purpose to announce outdated versions as stable and currently usable as unstable/testing?
Martin Michlmayr: Debian has traditionally had very slow release cycles. One reason for this is that Debian has often been used for servers. As it is being used increasingly for desktops, our release cycle is not adequate anymore. We know about this and are working on implementing faster release cycles which will meet the needs of server and desktop users. Another reason why Debian is often slow with release is that our system is very large. We have more than 10,000 packages and support 11 architectures. However, we are working on solutions which will allow faster release cycles. In this process, we are moving away from a feature based to a time based release. This will ensure predictable releases.