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Two Major Debian Releases In One Day

Posted by kdawson on from the busy-busy dept.

AndyCater writes "If all goes according to plan, Debian should release both an update to Debian Sarge (3.1r6, henceforth to be oldstable) and a new stable release (Debian 4.0, which was codenamed Etch) — and announce the results of the election for Debian Project Leader — all within 12 hours. Sarge was updated late on April 7th UTC, Sam Hocevar was announced as DPL at about 00:30 UTC, and preparations for the release of Debian Etch are ongoing and look good for later on the 8th."

13 of 189 comments (clear)

  1. Great News by dracocat · · Score: 4, Informative

    Seriously, this is very good news for us.

    This means we can finally start buying new Dell Servers again, instead of relying on ebay to obtain servers that had hard disks compatible with the stable release of debian. For the past two years, Dell had been phasing in new Sata drivers that sarge just refused to work with, but that etch has had no problems with. Hurray! Any chance of an upgrade path so we don't have to support both sarge AND etch?

    1. Re:Great News by pedestrian+crossing · · Score: 5, Informative

      Testing ran fine, but what do I do now? Do I have to do anything special to stay on Debian Etch, I mean 4.0? Or is such a thing not possible.

      It depends on your /etc/apt/sources.list.

      Each line will either end with the word "Etch" or "Testing".

      If it ends with Etch, then you will stay with Etch (Stable).

      If it ends with Testing, then you will start getting the new Testing packages.

      Probably the best thing to do is to stay with Etch for a couple of months while the new Testing settles down, then dist-upgrade back to Testing.

      --
      A house divided against itself cannot stand.
    2. Re:Great News by pedestrian+crossing · · Score: 4, Informative

      The reason I suggested staying with Etch for a little while is that there is likely to be some breakage in Testing as the backlog of Unstable updates move into Testing. For newbies (like the GP), this can be disconcerting.

      If it's only a couple of months, the dist-upgrade back to testing isn't likely to be too big of a deal. I think Testing is the sweet-spot for the desktop, so it makes sense to be there, but Testing can be a little unstable immediately after a release.

      --
      A house divided against itself cannot stand.
  2. Sam Hocevar won DPL elections by timecop · · Score: 5, Informative

    Sam Hocevar won the Debian Project Leader election by 8 votes over Steve McIntyre

  3. Re:TWO! in one day? by Krunch · · Score: 5, Informative

    Actually, the release was to be announced on April 1st but it has been delayed (again).
    http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2007 /03/msg00023.html

    --
    No GNU has been Hurd during the making of this comment.
  4. Where's the actual source for this posting? by advocate_one · · Score: 4, Informative

    I can't find anything on the Debian site itself...

    --
    Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
  5. The ISOs for Etch are already out there... by jafo · · Score: 4, Informative

    The ISOs for Etch are already available at http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/release/4.0_r0/
    Use the "bt-cd" or "bt-dvd" sub-directories for the torrents. The torrents are well seeded, I'm getting 3MB/sec (24mbps) download speeds right now.

    A few useful torrent links:

    i386:
    http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/release/4.0_r0/i 386/bt-dvd/debian-40r0-i386-DVD-1.iso.torrent
    http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/release/4.0_r0/i 386/bt-cd/debian-40r0-i386-CD-1.iso.torrent
    http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/release/4.0_r0/i 386/bt-cd/debian-40r0-i386-netinst.iso.torrent

    AMD 64:
    http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/release/4.0_r0/a md64/bt-dvd/debian-40r0-amd64-DVD-1.iso.torrent
    http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/release/4.0_r0/a md64/bt-cd/debian-40r0-amd64-CD-1.iso.torrent
    http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/release/4.0_r0/a md64/bt-cd/debian-40r0-amd64-netinst.iso.torrent

    Sean

  6. Re:Hmm... I can still see bugs in their tracker by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Some explanations about how to count:

    The official release-critical bug tracker[1] is still not updated to handle "versioned bug-reports". Meaning it counts _all_ open bug reports, while in reality the bug might be "closed" in the _version_ of the package in Etch but the entire bug in not closed (because it still effects Sarge and older?). So the official sources are a bit misleading.
    A debian developer called "Sesse" has an updated tracker[2]. This one gives a bit better indication about the truth. Hopefully his code will be moved over to become the official version.
    As also previously mentioned, Andreas "aba" Barth has his own bug tracking tool[3]. This gives a bit more information about each release-critical bug and has filtering capabilities.
    All sources indicate that there are many "RC" bugs left, but using aba's tool[3] you can see that most open bug reports are security issues. Security issues will come up all the time. There is already infrastructure in place to provide security updates for the stable distribution, so there's no need to hold back the release because of these issues as they can be fixed at any time.
    The few remaining issues are new bugs that has just recently surfaces and hasn't yet been analyzed. They might have a too high severity set, noone knows until they have been analyzed. This also doesn't give much reason to hold back the released, there will always be a few really new bugs that there hasn't been time to analyze yet.
    All in all, having all bugs fixed looks promising, even if noone can promise that the CD-images are 100% bug-free.

    [1] http://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/
    [2] http://people.debian.org/~sesse/bugscan/
    [3] http://bts.turmzimmer.net/details.php?bydist=etch

    Regards,
    fatal

  7. release-critical bug is not what you think it is. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    They aren't bugs that will prevent the release of Etch.

    They are bugs that threaten the package's inclusion in Etch.

  8. Re:finally, sid and testing can get moving again by Cthefuture · · Score: 4, Informative

    If you want all that then it's already available and the branch is called Ubuntu. Even better is that it is stabilized and releases are made every 6 months.

    --
    The ratio of people to cake is too big
  9. Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 released by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 released

    The Debian Project is pleased to announce the official release of
    Debian GNU/Linux version 4.0, codenamed "etch", after 21 months of
    constant development. Debian GNU/Linux is a free operating system
    which supports a total of eleven processor architectures and includes
    the KDE, GNOME and Xfce desktop environments. It also features
    cryptographic software and compatibility with the FHS v2.3 and
    software developed for version 3.1 of the LSB.

    Using a now fully integrated installation process, Debian GNU/Linux
    4.0 comes with out-of-the-box support for encrypted partitions. This
    release introduces a newly developed graphical frontend to the
    installation system supporting scripts using composed characters and
    complex languages; the installation system for Debian GNU/Linux has
    now been translated to 58 languages.

    Also beginning with Debian GNU/Linux 4.0, the package management
    system has been improved regarding security and efficiency. Secure
    APT allows the verification of the integrity of packages downloaded
    from a mirror. Updated package indices won't be downloaded in their
    entirety, but instead patched with smaller files containing only
    differences from earlier versions.

    Debian GNU/Linux runs on computers ranging from palmtops and handheld
    systems to supercomputers, and on nearly everything in between. A
    total of eleven architectures are supported including: Sun SPARC
    (sparc), HP Alpha (alpha), Motorola/IBM PowerPC (powerpc), Intel
    IA-32 (i386) and IA-64 (ia64), HP PA-RISC (hppa), MIPS (mips,
    mipsel), ARM (arm), IBM S/390 (s390) and -- newly introduced with
    Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 -- AMD64 and Intel EM64T (amd64).

    Debian GNU/Linux can be installed from various installation media
    such as DVDs, CDs, USB sticks and floppies, or from the network.
    GNOME is the default desktop environment and is contained on the
    first CD. The K Desktop Environment (KDE) and the Xfce desktop can be
    installed through two new alternative CD images. Also newly available
    with Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 are multi-arch CDs and DVDs supporting
    installation of multiple architectures from a single disc.

    Debian GNU/Linux can be downloaded right now via bittorent (the
    recommended way), jigdo or HTTP; see for
    further information. It will soon be available on DVD and CD-ROM from
    numerous vendors , too.

    This release includes a number of updated software packages, such as
    the K Desktop Environment 3.5 (KDE), an updated version of the GNOME
    desktop environment 2.14, the Xfce 4.4 desktop environment, the
    GNUstep desktop 5.2, X.Org 7.1, OpenOffice.org 2.0.4a, GIMP 2.2.13,
    Iceweasel (an unbranded version of Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.3), Icedove
    (an unbranded version of Mozilla Thunderbird 1.5), Iceape (an
    unbranded version of Mozilla Seamonkey 1.0.Cool, PostgreSQL 8.1.8,
    MySQL 5.0.32, GNU Compiler Collection 4.1.1, Linux kernel version
    2.6.18, Apache 2.2.3, Samba 3.0.24, Python 2.4.4 and 2.5, Perl 5.8.8,
    PHP 4.4.4 and 5.2.0, Asterisk 1.2.13, and more than 18,000 other
    ready to use software packages.

    Upgrades to Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 from the previous release, Debian
    GNU/Linux 3.1 codenamed "sarge", are automatically handled by the
    aptitude package management tool for most configurations, and to a
    certain degree also by the apt-get package management tool. As
    always, Debian GNU/Linux systems can be upgraded quite painlessly, in
    place, without any forced downtime, but it is strongly recommended to
    read the release notes for possible issues. For detailed instructions
    about installing and upgrading Debian GNU/Linux, please see the
    release notes .
    Please note that the release notes will be further improved and
    translated to additional languages in the coming weeks.

    ISO download: http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/4.0_r0/i386/is o-cd/

  10. Re:TWO! in one day? by pogson · · Score: 5, Informative
    This is a Great Day!

    Debian is one of the great old distros that just keeps getting better and not by adding frills. It is a large distro on many architectures supported by package managers from around the world. It is not hard to install as the reputation was. It is huge with many thousands of packages all smoothly (well, mostly ;-) integrated. I favour it for anyone migrating from that other OS, a new installation or on a large or small system.

    One of the neat features of Debian Etch is the smooth set of packages for installing LTSP (See http://ltsp.org/ ). One can go into a school on the weekend, set up a server and support all the old equipment as thin clients whether they be iMacs, i386, i486, P-what-evers and manage hundreds of accounts by Monday.

    I have been using Testing for a couple of months and there are few bugs. Nothing has prevented me from using it in production.

    Congratulations, Debian.org!

    --
    A problem is an opportunity http://mrpogson.com
  11. Back to normal? by pavon · · Score: 4, Informative

    I know that slashdotters like to dig on Debian for having slow releases, but sarge is the only one that took a ridiculously long amount of time to get out the door:

    1.1 - 1.2: 6 months
    1.2 - 1.3: 6 months
    1.3 - 2.0: 13 months
    2.0 - 2.1: 8 months
    2.1 - 2.2: 17 months
    2.2 - 3.0: 23 months
    3.0 - 3.1: 35 months
    3.1 - 4.0: 20 months

    I think that 18 months is a reasonable amount of time between stable releases. If Debian can stick close to that in the future then I will be happy.