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.'"
And its scheduled for release at roughly the same time as Saddam Hussein
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Currently, Gnome is simply too slow in reacting to interrupts like mouse movements or keyboard input. The lag between the physical action and the action on the screen is much greater than in KDE or (yech) Windows. 2.8 seems to have improved this a lot and I will be happy to finally have it on the base install.
Unfortunately, the problems with security that Gnome has (namely unchecked buffer overruns) are still lurking there. So despite the speed which the C implementation gives, the boundary checking taketh away.
So it goes.
But compared to Windows, Linux (and especially Debian) is really secure.
Debian incorporating newly released software into stable in less than two years, who would of though.
Not all conservatives are stupid,
but it is true that most stupid people are conservative.
- Hume
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.
Paul "Say no to feeping creaturism"
Garden Gnome 1.0 is scheduled for release on my lawn this spring...
... in 2008 :P
Pavlov. Does this name ring a bell?
Maybe they'll put E17 in there too, now that it's available. Except E17 is for old Koreans. I use GNOME, mainly because it's visually pretty clean and well-concieved among WIMPs; that said, I still occaisionally want to drop into evilwm. It's nice to see Debian being proactive about this stuff. Now, if only they would put Firefox 1.0 and Gimp 2.x (or have they? *doesn't check*)in there, we'd be getting somewhere.
*is run over by rotten tomatoes*
Luke: What is it Obi-Wan ?
OWK: I felt a deep disturbance in the force. It was as if Debian decided to be more current with their packages.
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.)
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).
anyone know whether x.org will make it into sarge as well?
my blog
PostgreSQL 8,
PHP 5,
Tomcat 5.0.x (5.5 would probably be pushing it a little..),
Sun jdk1.5?
is Sarge Will someone I should know? I am familiar with General Failure, though.
-- Make America hate again!
And for most users, at any one point in time the Unstable one offers the best tradeoff between features and stability. The current situation is that Sid is unstable, Sarge is testing and Woody is Stable.
Real Soon Now, they'll all shuffle along one, Woody will die and Sarge will become stable. I run sarge on my home and work machines and it's completely rock solid.
The X Strike Force
To sum it up, Debian is maintaining it's own tree of Xfree86, without any material that has the new license, but with some x.org and other patches. This is what will be in Sarge.
Yah! A Debian insider is reported to have said that the Sarge release will form part of a bundle with Duke Nukem Forever.
-- These views are my own and do not represent those of my employer in any way.
Well, gnome has succeeded where the subversion team has not been able to yet.
n
While Subversion (svn) 1.1.1 contains NUMEROUS important bugfixes, Debian's misunderstanding about svn library compatibility has kept it from getting into testing.
So svn 1.0.9, the much buggier version is likely to be included with Sarge when it is released. Even more sad given that svn 1.0 branch is DEAD and will no longer be fixed.
So what are we end-users to do when a debian maintainer is unresponsive to us and to the programmers who create the apps we love?
Sadly amusing in some ways since Debian seems to be using Subversion:
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/sv
Uhmm... no. Sarge remains sarge, woody remains woody and sid remains sid. The new unstable gets a new name. I believe the pre-woody stables were called potato, slink, and hamm respectively
cat sig >
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
Gnome 2.8 isn't older than 12 months and it is already included !! WOW
;-)
Well... we'll still have to wait for Sarge to be released as STABLE. That could take another while...
Maybe they're just looking for more "objections to GNOME 2.8 in unstable".
--
make install -not war
Yeah, that's what I mean. Perhaps I worded it vaguely :)
Sorry, got confused with what message was replying to what. On a new machine and seem to need to set up my /. display perferences again.
Here's what I do: on top of a stable Debian, I run a chrooted sid. Pronto! I get the best of both (ideally, I should be using testing instead of sid, since I'm not a Debian developer).
My point being that you get the best of both worlds. It is ridiculously easy to set up a chroot jail in Debian. "Google and ye shall find."
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
unstable will always be called sid. i.e.:
stable -> slink
testing -> potato
unstable -> sid
stable ->potato
testing -> woody
unstable ->sid
stable ->woody
testing -> sarge
unstable ->sid
stable ->sarge
testing -> etch
unstable -> sid
sid never changes.
The new unstable gets a new name.
No, it doesn't. sid = Still In Development, this is always the unstable branch. A new testing branch (etch?) will be created.
I have to ask, who the hell runs stable on a desktop - and who would want to?
:P
If you want stability, testing provides plenty of it. If you don't want to update often - just don't update (often). If you really need rock solid core stability, but want newer desktop software - then run stable with apt-pining for testing or unstable, and only install what you know you want from testing/unstable.
If you want a Debian desktop with frequent releases without all this crap, use Ubuntu
Stable is supposed to be the rock solid hardware, and the only things that should change should be when there's a bugfix or security fix. The point of it is you can basically rest assured that when running updates, shit won't ever break. I don't mean just "PAM broke!" break, I mean config overwritten, changed options, etc. break. The system for all intents and purposes could be set to automatically grab updates and run for years.
Disclaimer: I've never used Ubuntu, I'm a Debian man who suffers the trials of using apt-pining just like everyone else who wants this should have to!
cyn, free software and *nix operating systems enthusiast.
Debian dosn't follow the common software engineering practice of setting deadlines for relase cycles. They claim this is because it relies on volunteers. But this is "no excuse", because OpenBSD and FreeBSD rely on volunteers. OpenBSD has always had 6 months release cycles and this is what Scott Long (From FreeBSD) has said recently:
"By the middle of 2002 is was very apparent that we needed to start focusing on getting 5.0 released. Unfortunately, we fell into the trap of wanting to finish more features in order to feel good about 5.x. (...) New -STABLE branched will be made on a calendar-based time line (...) While as engineers we all tend to hate timelines, this does have a lot of positive aspects. First, it increases the predictability of the development both for our users and for our developers. Users can plan effectively for upgrades and testing/validation knowing that there will be major and minor releases at fixed times of the year. Developers can judge when to start new projects and when to focus on bug-fixing because there will no longer be the temptation to delay a release by a month in order to slide 'one more thing' in. This is not unlike most commercial OS vendors, and we've received a _LOT_ of feedback that this method of planning is desperately needed.
Link for the above here
These practices should be adopted in Debian too. If BSD development can do it, and it involves kernel developments, Debian can do it too (mostly userland hacks).
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
I guess I should learn how to submit bugs, since i have not done it; but there are complaints all over the forums.
I run multiuser ltsp.org 4.1 with mandrkake 10.1 and after a couple days of operation GDM 2.6 gives me a gray screen on all new display managers requested, gdm-restart and gdm-safe-restart simply don't fix the problem, it just worsens and to fix it I must restart the whole server!!!!
ltsp's author James McQuillan simply opted to use KDM, and that's too bad since it's not as themeable as GDM, heres an example:
http://www.themedepot.org/showarea.php4?area=11
I stick to GDM because it correctly updates wtmp and because of that the '# last' command works correctly with multiple users, it's very important for me to monitor computer use, so a little stability would be nice as well.
Both GNOME and Ubuntu have switched to this approach too. It seems a good idea with volunteer projects to set solid deadlines like that.
KDE does it in a similar way, too, and has for a long time:
Release Schedules / Development Plans
Perhaps "unsupported" would be a better term than "dead". I'm still using Potato for our Samba server (which is not exposed to the internet), and although there are no more updates, it's still alive and kicking, good as new.
BTW, I recently had a less-than-stellar experience with RedHat Enterprise WS; I ended up downloading a lot of packages from Debian and converting them with Alien just to get decent functionality.
--
DLL
Stable is for anyone who needs security support.
Stable is for people who need an unchanging system.
What to do if I both want security support and less-than-three-years-old stuff in my box?
At least, an 'alert' list for 'testing' security related holes should be available, checking bugtraq twice a day and trying to analyze wether my system is affected is _not_ a long-term solution.
I had the same problem of debian stable being too stale, testing not including security updates, and unstable changing too much. I started a company http://opensensesolutions.com/ and we sell linux machines that use a frozen repository of debian testing with key security updates and bug fixes added on. Everything is designed for a select subset of hardware to make testing manageable.
Open Source is Common Sense: http://groovix.com/
Array
I'm curious, does your sig somehow trick Slashcode into interpreting it as an array, or did you just type 'Array' there? :)
Opinions are like assholes: Everyone has one, and no one wants to look at the other guy's. This is why it's such a good thing that we have so many distributions. When someone tells me they need a Linux-based server, I send them to debian. Any other use, and I send them to gentoo. If you want up-to-date packages, gentoo should be your first choice. Debian is for people who need stability over all else. If you need something in between, well, that's what /usr/local is for. Build subversion yourself.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
unstable will always be called sid.
Yes, go watch Toy Story...Sid is the unstable next door neighbor with a tendency to blow stuff up. Debian unstable is aptly named.
I'm going to go back in my box and will think within the limits of my box: MS Sucks Linux Good I read too much Slashdot.
Right, the way all software development should be done is to make frequent regular releases with some internal meaningless version number.
Then at some interval determined by market requirements, marketing approach you and say "We need another release to call 5.0". You take a look at your recent internal releases, pick one that has a good blend of reliability and features, and hand them that to label "5.0" and give to QA. If QA fail it, you can pick another one to try. If QA pass it, it gets a "5.0" sticker put on it and it's shipped to users.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I *am* using Debian and I can never remember what the stupid code names refer to. When I read the headline I had no idea whether it meant that GNOME was going into stable, unstable, or what.
Then again, since tried GNOME and switched to KDE for performance and stability reasons, I also didn't give a flying one...
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Whoa this is crazy! DEBIAN has Gnome 2.8 in one of their releases before Mandrake? Come on, Mandrake folks- give us Gnome 2.8! Puh-leese! :)
My programming language has two operators: dowhatiwant and nonotthatyouidiot.
:)
I assert that operator+ does not exist in my programming language. See above for proof.
It is possible to prove the nonexistence of something, but it requires that the entire context is known. For real-world problems (like does God exist) the entire context is not known. One problem, of course, is knowing at which point the entire context is known
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
"Real Soon Now"
Sorry, but announcements from Debian that sarge will go stable 'real soon now' usually seem to mean 'next year some time'.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
"Opinions are like assholes: Everyone has one, and no one wants to look at the other guy's."
So... a philosopher would kinda be like... a proctologist?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Rule of thumb is really to not use Debian stable on system where you acutally want to work on. Debian stable is worth thinking about if you are running a bunch of servers or desktop systems and want to keep them in sync or a router which should only run one or two programms, but even then having a unstable testsystem and rsync might do a better job, since you can't really use a stable without inserting a bunch of unofficial and self backported packages first which in turn make 'stable' not so much 'stable' any more.
Debian stable has a long long history of being full of horrible outdated packages, the pure stable user is still running Gimp1.2 and Kde2.2 after all. I personally have simply given up on Debian stable, it wasn't much useable in the past and probally won't much useable in the future. Hopefully Ubuntu will do a better job at providing a system that I can actually recomment to people, but Debian stable, a few isolated cases asside, is really not much usefull.
The worst of all is really that Debian is completly working against their target audience, sure there are a handfull of people which are using Debian stable and where it makes sense, but I guess there are a hell of a lot more people which are using testing and thus don't get any security updates much in time. The current Debian release cycle does really not work much at all, and simply redirecting people to testing or even unstable is not the solution its the PROBLEM.
For those of us who are geeks but not linux users:
someone want to define (or at least provide a link) to wtf "sarge" is in this context?
Yes, I could google for it, but (1) I'm too lazy and (2) that's really the editor's job, isn't it?
I believe the next stable release after sarge will be called etch.
There: Something at a specific location.
Their: Owned by someone.
Please make sure your english compiles.
Exactly.
I've seen projects go quite sour because they depended on sarge going stable according to the debian schedule and so-called plans.
My scepticism is warranted and I predict (fingers to temples, makes buzzing sound) that we woody will still be stable this time next year.
And when sarge *finally* goes stable, Gnome 4.something will be out but *not* in sarge and people who want an up-to-date desktop will *still* have to go with unstable or testing.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Funny. I use it on my desktop at home exclusively (as does my girlfriend). You know, I have a life besides computers and don't want to update my system every now and then.
(Recently switched from StarOffice 5.2 to 7.0, because it handles .doc better - that and a recent Opera are probably the only not-outdated packages on the system.)
WOW! That's lazy! In a nutshell, there are 3 branches to the Debian Linux distribution:
Stable, aka "Woody"
Testing, aka "Sarge"
Unstable, aka "Sid"
Sarge is about to take Woody's place as the Stable distribution, basically.
I don't moderate anymore. Karma penalty for 90% fair mods? Can I mod that unfair?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
How can you call yourself a geek and not know that?
I am using Sarge (testing). When it is released as (stable), Im wondering if I will auto-jump to sid? I ask because in my apt sources.list I have apt sources of "testing".
Check it a little closer and you'll notice that that distribution is empty.
My understanding is that the testing-security package designation is seldom used, instead the packages are uploaded to the unstable distribution, presumably with a priority of high, which means it should enter testing two days later, depending on a few factors which you can read about on How Testing Works. In a sense, therefore, unstable is in some ways more secure than testing.
Also note that the testing distribution is not officially supported by the security team and that use of testing on a server for this reason is not recommended.
Don't worry about that, because, the next testing won't be Sid, but Sarge itself. In other words, a particular testing version begins its life as a copy of the stable version. [For an illustration, check the following quote from the Debian Web pages describing the current testing distribution (which is to be called 'sarge'):]
This release started as a copy of woody, and is currently in a state called 'testing'.But, just don't expect it to stay that way for long, because, I think, they remove the freeze on packages moving in from unstable.
Valgrind on X86 is a tool that will monitor access just as you described and provide this feedback. It simply hooks itself in at runtime so no compile needed (much more info if compiled -g of course)
Regarding testing, yes you cannot ever prove that a bug does not exist but we should always try.
Testing was not created until Dec 18 2000, which was after potato was released. Prior to testing unstable was just "frozen" for a while. However, there has been a "sid" dist for a lot longer than that. sid was previously used for stuff that was not suitable for release, such as unfinished arch ports.
19 Oct 2000 - RFC: implementation of package pools
13 Dec 2000 - package pools implemented on ftp-master
18 Dec 2000 - testing to be implemented on ftp-master
10 Feb 2001 - Changes to experimental, proposed-updates and orphaned distributions
This is not to say it's bad, but I had a horrible experience installing a Samsung ML-1740. I tried:
1. Using gnome-cups-manager
2. Enabling the root account and using the installer off the CD, it wouldn't authenticate.
3. Installing as an ML-1710 and replacing the ppd with the 1740 ppd.
4. Using the CUPS interface, which is disabled.
This took me a good 3 hours to exhaust all my possibilities before switching to Fedora Core 3. RPM hell be damned, Ubuntu hell is worse.
Please stop stalking me, bro.