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Debian Announces Sarge Will Include GNOME 2.8
El Cubano writes "A recent posting to the debian-devel-announce mailing list announces that Sarge will release with GNOME 2.8. From the announcement: 'After requests and a detailed proposal from the GNOME team, we accepted
an upload of GNOME 2.8 into sid, and, via the usual mechanisms, into
sarge. We should mention that the release team was running out of
objections to GNOME 2.8 in unstable that the GNOME team hasn't
satisfactorily addressed; this, and the fact that they have demonstrated
good reaction times of late are the main reasons why we're approving it
despite the timing.'"
How about KDE 3.3?
Not that it really matters anymore - many of whom have been waiting for Sarge have got with the program and switched to Ubuntu.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
Also, this might help combat the "Debian [stable] never includes new stuff" meme. Another good thing.
"New" is relative. After stable switches from Woody to Sarge, it is highly unlikely that you will get a new version of GNOME until Etch becomes stable. So no, Debian stable will never be the place to look for new stuff, except when the stable version changes, but then that is the whole idea.
I've been running stable (woody) since it came out, and it has served me well. I started using Adrian Bunk's backports, and then selected things from backports.org... Then I upgraded to KDE from downloads.kde.org, and then openoffice from some other backport collection. Amazingly enough, this collection of software worked well enough for me.
I recently took the plunge and converted a couple of machines to testing (soon to be sarge). First thing I will say is that even with all of the backports, the upgrade went very smoothly. And I'll also say that sarge is working well for me; so well that I've installed it on several other machines using the new debian-installer rc candidates, and that has worked flawlessly for me as well!
As soon as security update support is up and running for testing, anyone remotely interested in sarge should consider upgrading and filing bug reports as appropriate. This is how you can help speed up the "real" release of sarge!
And I do think that when sarge comes out, it's going to be an excellent platform. It is so much nicer about hardware autodetection, font handling, and about a million other things... Without losing any of the old things that you love about Debian.
Lets hope that the next stable release doesn't take too long, although given Debian's nature, it's hard to see how it won't... Assuming the official compiler moves to gcc 3.4 (or the upcoming 4.0), then there is going to be another painful transition for all of those C++ applications. Hopefully someday g++ will have a stable C++ ABI and those transitions won't be an issue for projects shipping C++ libraries... (This was one of the major issues for getting KDE into unstable earlier this year.)
Stable is for people who need an unchanging system (no, I'm not one of them), please leave it alone.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Situation now:
potato = obselete
woody = stable
sid = unstable
sarge = testing
Once sarge is declared stable,
woody = obselete
sid = unstable
sarge = stable
unknown = testing
So, sid will remain unstable and a new name for the testing branch will have to be decided (unless I missed something and that's already happened).
PostgreSQL 8,
PHP 5,
Tomcat 5.0.x (5.5 would probably be pushing it a little..),
Sun jdk1.5?
But AFAIK there isn't really an alternative for people who are willing to use a somewhat changing system. unstable changes too much; it's OK for a desktop, but not for a server. testing would be acceptable, but doesn't get security updates.
So I run stable on my little home server, eagerly awaiting the release of Sarge.
This sig under construction. Please check back later.
But isn't this due to a "cultural" problem? For instance, the fine OpenBSD guys have given us strncat and strncpy, and a patch has been applied to glibc in August 2000.
/ ms g00052.html
http://sources.redhat.com/ml/libc-alpha/2000-08
GNU/Linux programmers have a bad track record on this issue. Not to mention safer languages. Consider the little attention a mainstream language like C# has gathered in the community (I won't even mention other languages that achieve C-like performance such as SML or Common Lisp). People use C for everything, not just systems programming. The result you get to read at CERT. And let's not even mention formal methods...
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts