Slashdot Mirror
Debian 6.0 "Squeeze" Frozen
edesio writes with a snippet from debian-news.net, trumpeting an announcement from the ongoing DebConf10 in NYC: "Debian's release managers have announced a major step in the development cycle of the upcoming stable release Debian 6.0 'Squeeze': Debian 'Squeeze' has now been frozen. In consequence this means that no more new features will be added and all work will now be concentrated on polishing Debian 'Squeeze' to achieve the quality Debian stable releases are known for. The upcoming release will use Linux 2.6.32 as its default kernel in the installer and on all Linux architectures.""
is called a slushy, smoothy, orange julius, or a lemon shakeup.
Note the bit about "Linux architectures." Squeeze will include GNU/kFreeBSD: Debian running on top of a FreeBSD kernel.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Debians policy is always that fixing problems takes priority over release schedules. They don't release a half-finished product. They'll wait years if its required to get things the way they want it.
Posted by a Debian GNU/Linux user
What a terrible attitude to have. The Open Source community is about shared effort for shared gain, not personal recognition. No matter the distribution that gets all the 'spotlight', it's Linux that reaps the reward, and the more ground Linux gains the better off everyone with a PC is.
If you aren't angry, you aren't paying attention.
Thats not exactly true. A lot of stuff Ubuntu does/fixes gets sent back to Debian. Its a mutual relationship that they both benefit from. The same is true for many other debian-based distributions. And hey, its open source, the people who makes Debian want others to reap their benefits.
Posted by a Debian GNU/Linux user
Compared to a few years ago, yes, debian is a lot more up to date. I'd recommend running testing, or unstable if you know what you're doing. Stable doesn't get updated after release except for critical fixes like security updates (which is the way its supposed to be, so you can throw it on a server and not have to worry about a future update breaking things), but debians testing and unstable quality is higher than the stable of most distros.
Posted by a Debian GNU/Linux user
And ubuntu's community has to spend time dealing with the newbies, that's a huge weight off of debian's shoulders, it's a symbiotic relationship.
While ubuntu is derived from debian that doesn't stop them from packaging newer stuff than in debian. The big name stuff is often newer in ubuntu's development versions than in sid. More obscure stuff will generally be either at the same versions or newer in sid than in ubuntus development version.
Debian and ubuntu have very different release cycles. Ubuntu makes a release every 6 months and releases are prepared one at a time. This fast turnaround means more up to date software at relase time but also means little time for things to settle and bugs to get rooted out. Ubuntu won't delay a release unless there is a cripping issue with a package they consider particulally important.
Debian's release cycles on the other hand are generally on the order of two years these days and they tend to spend a large amount of time at the end of that release letting things stabilise and working on the bug count.
Things got particularlly bad a few years back. The sarge development cycle was debians longest ever and it came at a time when linux in general was improving a lot for the desktop but it still gets annoying near the end of a cycle.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Is debian any more up-to-date these days?
Debian is always as up-to-date as you want it to be. It's just a question of which version you run.
Debian "stable" goes in cycles. Shortly after a release, it's fairly up to date. As time goes on, working towards the next release, packages get a little dated because they are intentionally not updated. Security and bug fixes are applied but no upgrades or new features -- this is why they call it "stable", because it doesn't change.
Debian "testing" is a less cyclical and tends to stay fairly up to date all the time. The exception is during a freeze, like the one we just started. Since the current testing is being morphed into a new stable, it has just stopped receiving updates, and won't start again until the new stable version is released.
Debian "unstable" is always quite up to date. All new features and packages are introduced in unstable first. Don't let the name confuse you -- it's about as reliable as most distributions' released versions. It's "unstable" in the sense that it gets constant updates, which means that things are always changing. Every once in a blue moon, a change will actually seriously break something for a day or so. Maybe once every 3-4 years in my experience.
Debian "experimental" is more of a layer on top of "unstable", and it is what it sounds like: experimental. The Bleeding Edge.
In addition to those versions, you can mix-n-match a bit by running stable plus backports. That allows you to keep a very stable, consistent base platform, and just pull in newer versions of particular packages, as needed.
I switched from Debian to Ubuntu three years ago, but I'm very seriously considering switching back. My theory was that Ubuntu LTS releases were roughly equivalent to Debian stable, and that regular Ubuntu was somewhere between testing and unstable. The second half of that works out sort of okay, but using Ubuntu LTS as an alternative to Debian stable is a bad choice. The upgrade path from one LTS release to the next is horribly painful, because you have to upgrade to each intermediate release. And, in practice, I find the every-six-months big-bang upgrades more intrusive and problematic than the continual, incremental upgrades on Debian testing or unstable.
All in all, after giving Ubuntu a good try, I think I'm going back to Debian stable on my server, Debian stable+backports on my laptop and Debian unstable on my desktop.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Well the first announced freeze date for squeeze was part of an unpopular plan to sync up with ubuntu by having a very short release cycle. That was abandoned pretty quickly (unfortunately after that)
Asside from that there afaict are a couple of reasons to delay the freeze.
A big reason is what are referred to as transitions. A transition is a group of package updates (usually a new major version of a library and the various updates and rebuilds associated with it) that need to move from unstable to testing at the same time to leave testing in a consistent state (unstable is allowed to be in an inconsistant state, testing isn't). The release planners will have a set of transitions that they really want to get in for a given release, transitions can easilly get held up by build failures and other rc bugs and they don't want to do too many at the same time because then they become intertangled leaving the release team with one big transition which is even harder to make migrate.
Also they want to pick a good time to freeze. Freezing the application level stuff while there are still big issues to fix in core package won't affect the release date much while it will mean releasing with older versions of the application level stuff (which is the stuff that is most visible to users and often the stuff that needs the most security updates).
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
In mid June I set up my latest server based on Squeeze with the expectation that it would go stable this summer. For a while I thought perhaps I had jumped the gun and would be stuck with a relatively unstable system for a longer period, but I guess not.
In particular, I'm happy with Squeeze because I could use it to get my Kerberos-OpenLDAP-OpenAFS system working on both the file server and workstations. Not that I've ever use any FOSS other than Debian for my server, but after my attempts failed to get the latest Ubuntu client to run the necessary client software for this (unfortunately) uncommon, but very capable distributed file system, I suspected the same Debian version for the workstation represented my best chance of success. And sure enough: it worked straight away! Ubuntu may have certain benefits, but it seems that if you want a desktop system that is a little out of the ordinary, Debian is still your best bet.
Mod this guy as informative! Having worked with Ubuntu developers on some bugs, I can say that non-Ubuntu specific fixes are sent upstream where they get commited.
That's only true for non-LTS releases. You can go from one LTS to the next and skip the intermediate releases.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Having a friendly attitude != sucking up, necessarily.
I had to learn this the hard way, back when, so pay heed: politeness is a social lubricant. It gets in the areas where different peoples' rough edges would otherwise rub and create friction, and it costs nothing to be polite.
For example, a few months ago I opened a bug report with $LIBRE_PROJECT asking for help making a Windows build, or whether they'd be kind enough to start releasing Windows builds of the stable tree, rather than an occasional build from an unstable branch. After a bit of back and forth - the guys who weren't involved in making the Windows build were a bit rude - they eventually pointed me to the non-obvious way of compiling their code, and eventually their Windows guy started releasing regular semi-stable builds (the Win build isn't quite there yet).
A little politeness as social lubricant, and I might have helped some other poor schmuck who wanted a free Windows program that does what $PROJECT does.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
"I wish they'd just cut the bull and focus on unstable and testing."
Why should they sacrifice QUALITY in order to do that, when you can just run Unstable, Testing, or another distro?
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Individuals without a company and contributors with unknown affiliation add more to the Linux kernel than any _individual_ company, but that does not negate the statement that "the majority of contributions to Linux are from profit-making corporations". Red Hat, Novell, and IBM together make more Linux kernel contributions than all of the unaffiliated and unknown-affiliation contributors combined.
The document you appears to have misread even includes this sentence: "It is worth noting that, even if one assumes that all of the 'unknown' contributors were working on their own time, over 70% of all kernel development is demonstrably done by developers who are being paid for their work."