Debian 3.0r6 Released

Polkan Garcia writes "The Debian group has released an update to the 'Woody' distribution of the popular GNU/Linux OS. From the site: 'This is the sixth and final update of Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 (codename 'woody') which mainly adds security updates to the stable release, along with a few corrections to serious problems. Those who frequently update from security.debian.org won't have to update many packages and most updates from security.debian.org are included in this update.' More good news: r6 is the final update of woody, the new stable release is coming."

Comments

Re:Question (Maybe slightly OT)....

[NeuralAbyss]

See the homepage of the The Debian X Strike Force - X.org and Xfree86 guys.

Found this link from the Project Leader's page

Re:I think it is a good idea not to update quickly

[Elf-friend]

XP wasn't eighteen months obsolete when it released. Yet that is just about how far behind everyone else Woody was when it shipped. Some people were willing to cope with that, since the project leaders promised a short turn around on Sarge (IIRC, they said they were aiming at under a year). Instead, here we are three years later, with Sarge still somewhere "out there" on the horizon, with packages even further behind than Woody's were when it released. I don't feel like waiting until 2008 before I can migrate to tools that other users have now.

An additional point about the XP comparison: nobody shipped software requiring Windows XP in 1999, but that's exactly what happens with Debian. When the Linux version of Neverwinter Nights shipped in 2003, I couldn't install it on Woody, (and still can't, AFAIK) because of Woody's ancient version of gcc. I need Sarge to run that on a stable version of Debian. Here we are, two years later, and still it won't run on Debian stable. It will run on nearly any other distro's latest stable release (and on BSD), but not Debian stable.

The Debian release cycle just keeps getting worse, and I see no end in sight for that. An update every three years might well be fine if the updates weren't falling further behind with each one.

Re:Debian support for modern CPUs

[darkcompanion]

There is Debian support for AMD64; it's currently waiting to be included into the official Debian archive once Sarge has been released (probably next week). Currently, the AMD64 port consists of an unofficial archive containing a complete 64bit binary port of both unstable and testing distributions. The AMD64 Debian site has even netinstall iso's. See http://www.debian.org/ports/amd64/

Re:apt-get

[swillden]

I thought that apt-get had was unable to handle multiple architectures on a single system, which prevented a fully integrated 64 & 32 bit version of Debian. Has that problem with apt-get been solved yet?

Yes and no. The "biarch" system has been working for several years to support both 32 and 64 bit Sparc software. That same technology could be used now to support mixed 32/64-bit code for AMD64 processors, but Debian developers have opted not to do that. Instead, the new multiarch system will support an arbitrary number of architectures, very flexibly. That will not only address the AMD64 issue but it will also make handling of other x86 subarchitectures easier.

Currently, there are some Debian packages that come in multiple flavors because they benefit significantly from processor-specific optimizations. The kernel, for example, comes compiled for 386, 586, 686, K6, K7, amd64-generic, amd64-k8 and em64t, plus SMP versions of most of those. Mplayer also comes in multiple versions, though not as many. This is handled by having a big list of kernel-image and mplayer packages. With multiarch, you'll be able to specify that you have, say, an AMD64 processor, and then apt-get will understand which subarchitectures will and will not run on your system, and which subarchitectures are preferred. Then you can just pick generic packages and the system will install the best version. It will also handle situations like mozilla and flashplayer. If you install mozilla on an AMD64 box, you should probably get a 64-bit version for best performance. However, if you want flash to work, you have to install the Macromedia plugin and it's 32-bit, so you have to install a 32-bit version of mozilla so that it can use the 32-bit plugin. The new multiarch system will handle all of those dependencies for you.

So apt-get is perfectly capable of handling a mixed 32 and 64-bit system now, but only if the package maintainers set things up carefully (which is what most other distros must do). Debian has opted to forego such a "manual" solution and instead wait until the elegant and flexible general solution is done.