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Two Major Debian Releases In One Day
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."
Sam Hocevar won the Debian Project Leader election by 8 votes over Steve McIntyre
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.
Actually, the release was to be announced on April 1st but it has been delayed (again).7 /03/msg00023.html
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/200
No GNU has been Hurd during the making of this comment.
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
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