Slashdot Mirror
Debian Sarge Coming Soon
daria42 writes "The long awaited 3.1 release of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution - codenamed Sarge - is due out next week on the 6th of June, according to the project's release team. Around 50 release-critical bugs remain to be fixed. One more update to Debian 3.0 will also be released prior to that date. And it's about time - the last formal release was back in July 2002. Debian 3.0 will probably be supported with security patches for another 12 months."
here: http://bts.turmzimmer.net/details.php
:)
The June 6 date still depends on how fast the level will drop -- at the time of writing, it is at 17 RC bugs, it will have to be at 0 on June 3, so they have some work to do.
Security support is already in place, though, so there is not really a reason to hold off upgrading
Jan
http://www.debian.org/releases/etch/index
Hmm 50 is an over-estimate (maybe it wasn't when the story was submitted); according to http://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/ there are only 28.
To prevent some Debian trolling I want to clarify some facts about the release model used by the Debian project.
Debian always provides a stable distribution. This distribution is guaranteed to, yes you guessed it, be stable. That is if you install Debian stable on a server you know that you won't have to update configuration files because the application has changed its internal format and suchlike.
This does not mean that the stable distribution is never updated, in fact Debian has a security team that fixes security bugs and backports security fixes from newer versions of a package.
The stable distribution has a quite slow release cycle, but there is no reason for a desktop user to run the stable distribution. You can run either the unstable distribution, that regardless of its name is quite stable, or you can run the testing distribution.
The unstable and testing distributions have really large collections of packages and are updated each day, updating your distribution is as simple as typing:
A desktop user can also opt to run a Debian-derivative like Ubuntu.
After Sarges release there will be nice new things coming to unstable:
;)
KDE 3.4
GNOME 2.10
gcc 4.0
xorg 6.8.2
python 2.4
Long live Debian
1) It guarantees a clean upgrade path for people still running 3.0.
One of the nice things about Debian is you don't need to reinstall. Most of the problems you experience upgrading testing/unstable every day have been ironed out for anyone attempting the mammoth 3.0->3.1 upgrade.
2) It will continue to do this.
Third party distros come and go. Progeny? Corel? Ubuntu is developing at lightning pace right now, but as it diverges from Debian and acquires legacy maintenance baggage of its own development will slow. Sometimes users are abandoned. I believe this happens frequently to RedHat users.
3) It's really really stable and it's really really big.
Other distros shotgun packages as well as architectures. They're also not necessarily as anal about bugs.
4) It's a concrete base and point of reference for third party distros.
Debian Testing has basically been a slow moving Debian Stable (without Security support) for the whole last year. With the release out the way Testing will become more unstable again for a while and third party distros will likely base their efforts on stable again for a while. It's important for Debian's future that this is made possible.