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Debian Freeze Rescheduled
from debian-devel-announce@debian.org:
I was too hasty when declaring this freeze. Adam di Carlo assured me that the boot-floppies are just not ready yet, and won't be for a number of weeks even if they get help. Also, the count of release-critical bugs is going back up as fast as it came down. (I think that many of them are not really release-critical, but there are so many that just evaluating them takes a significant amount of time.)
I hoped that a week or two of old-style freeze could get potato in shape in time for a mid-December release, but it's just not going to happen. Adam says that the boot-floppies can be ready for freezing on December 1st, and of release-quality on January 1st, and that those dates are somewhat optimistic.
I think that freezing on either of those dates is not useful, due to the winter festivities and the end of the world. I'm rescheduling the freeze for mid-January, the weekend of the 15th and 16th. This will be a freeze according to the original plan for potato, with all the pieces ready beforehand and a fast track to a release in February.
Please keep this freeze date in mind; don't start anything that you can't finish before that time. In particular, with library upgrades and package reorganizations, keep in mind that other packages will have to be recompiled. I'll ask the archive maintainers to actually hold back such packages starting around December 20th.
The good news is that James and I spent a day processing most of Incoming in preparation for the freeze (and I apologize to James for not actually freezing after all that), so the backlog is now gone.
In the meantime, the boot-floppies NEED HELP. If you want to get involved, you can check out their code with this command: cvs -d youraccount@cvs.debian.org:/cvs/debian-boot co boot-floppies Make sure that CVS_RSH is set to ssh.
The mailing list for coordination is debian-boot; CVS update messages are also sent there. The bug reports are collected under the package name "boot-floppies".
Richard Braakman
X-mas? Don't you mean Hanukah? I jus' love dem latkes (potato pancakes)...
Of course, the Hamm distribution is problematic in this case.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
to bake potatos:
.sig
dd if:/dev/random of:/vmlinuz 512k
matisse:~$ cat
I wouldn't call it openmindedness and a drive to censor so much as an unwillingness to participate in religious debates.
:).
Every group tends to have hot topics which attract fanatics. Distribution vs. distribution on Linux groups; GPL vs. BSD on advocacy groups (check my user profile for what may well be the one non-vitriolic discussion on the merits of the GPL and BSD license, ever) Canon vs. Nikon on photo groups; objectivism/libertarianism vs. the rest of the world on all groups
The point is that when the religious debate pops up, critical thought goes out the window. Should everyone who wants to fruitfully participate in a group be forced to witness rehash after rehash of this? I'm not claiming that I'm innocent of rehashing, because I'm not. In the past, I've blown as hard as any other blowhard. I hope I've grown up since, though.
Moderation is a method of peer evaluation. And people can be moderated up even after being moderated down - somebody moderated down an article of mine, once upon a time, calling it "flamebait" or "irrelevant"; it ended up at +3 after a few more moderators passed through and disagreed with the first. The point is that no moderation is irrevocable.
Not to mention: moderation down isn't the same as removal. You are moderated down, not removed. If people want to read what you have to say, they can. If you still consider moderation to be censorship, perhaps you could extend the label to literary criticism, for example, since less people will read a book with a bad review.
--
--
There is no premature anti-fascism. -Ernest Hemingway
Hold on, Pappa Gates taught me to do things diferently. Rush the product out the door, the release updates/bugfixes. This open source mentality of fixing things before releasing them is silly.
/* CDM */
The Debian process is unwieldy and slow, but it produces a really good distribution. I for one am willing to wait. I'm curious, though, what Corel thinks of this- assuming that they are working from slink, they are already working with a very dated distribution, and I wonder how they are going to try to keep themselves current while working within the Debian framework.
~luge
IAAL,BIANLY
Posts by people with high karma who are logged in start with a score of 2; that's why if you look at this one, it will start off at 2.
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Corel is on 2.2.12 currently.
Sound drivers are included as modules. No recompile is
necessary.
You don't need to install full slink and then upgrade all those packages to potato, all you need is the base system and then install potato rightaway. The base system is like 8 megabyte.
Sheesh, so many people here saying "2.4 will be out before Potato", "Slink was out of date when it came out, and so will be Potato", etc.
My favorite was the one saying Debian needs to speed up their bug resolution process. Don't you folks get it? If you want it to improve, you've got to help. Don't sit there complaining expecting some mysterious software overlord to fix all the little problems and hand you a nice new Debian distribution for Christmas. Get your hands dirty, fix some of the problems in the boot floppies, or shut up and don't complain when they don't get fixed as soon as you would like.
Debian isn't some monolithic software corporation, it's people like you, like me, like everyone else who thinks that Linux is fun, that's it's a priviledge and a responsibility to give back. I know not everyone is a programmer, but each and every one of you can do something. Spend an hour writing a HOW-TO, or updating a man page, or trying to reproduce a bug, something, anything other than complaining on slashdot that Debian is delayed.
Please, re-read the letter. They are asking for your help. So, if you really want Debian to succeed, quit being a consumer in the gift economy, and start being a producer. It doesn't have to be much, but anything is better than whining.
Sorry, rant mode off.
Some guy named Chris
Difference is, you can grab the newest, most bleeding edge devel debian any time you like.
Knowing when to push back the date is a good thing. Especially when it isn't about trying to get people hooked on vaporware to kill your enemies.
This sig is false.
Having used Debian for over 3 years I feel that i need to chip in here.
A few little things.
Also the largest part of the freeze being pushed back is the boot floppies. The change from 2.0 to the 2.2 series kernels is quite large. The kernels are of much larger size and even more hardware is supported. The team working on the boot-floppies has to be sure that they will have support for the hardware that it will be installed on.
As far as the unwillingness to recompile a kernel that i have been reading. That's insane! Since most PC's have IDE drives those are compiled into the kernel. Well If i have an all scsi machine I don't want those in my kernel. They are wasting resources. And vice-versa. No distribution has the perfect kernel out of the box. And they shouldn't there are too many compile options and additional drivers.
Debian has been a wonderful distribution to work with and a wonderful project to get involved with. These volunteers are still pounding away at code and makefiles and debian/rules files for all of you, for free and you all are criticizing them for not "shipping on time" It's postings like this that really upset me.
One last little bit. Debian is a rock solid distribution a lot of that is in the "don't release it until it's ready" mentality. I am glad about this. Also security updates are available at security.debian.org So please at rtfm or at least ask around before making blanket statements about packages not being available.
Maybe now they can include KDE. Or will that be for Debian 3 (err Debian 3k at the rate of development.
You could just point apt to kde and grab it there...
Actually, making a friendlier apt that makes it easy to temporarily point to websites besides Debian would be tres cool.
What would be REALLY cool is if they were to add an extension to the packages file so that through file associations you can just go to the webpage of the author, click on the packages file, and have some apt-like program point there and install it on your system.
Of course you'd want to have some sort of security (PGP or the like) to be sure some malicious site doesn't take advantage of that to plant a trojan in your system.
Don't get me wrong - I love grabbing sources and compiling myself (mainly if I want to play with it a bit), but there are times when I just want the stuff installed with no hassles.
We must also consider the caliber of users who will soon be flooding into the linux domain. They most certainly will NOT want to see so much as a shell prompt or any other text-based program on their machine.
And so my wish list remains:
- A minimal install that puts the BARE MINIMUM necessary to boot the system, do some file management and configuration, and install other programs if you want. Debian does this well already, but I think that with a little more tweaking they could get it even smaller.
- A minimal X install that puts enough stuff to boot into KDE or GNOME or some plain old window manager. No games, no funky apps (well, maybe a text editor and a calculator). Can it be done in less than 50 megs? I think so...
- A way to temporarily point to other distribution sources from program authors to get the latest and greatest. This should be able to happen automatically (with the option to turn the feature off, of course), and then have the distrib pointer point back to debian again when it has installed the package.
- A nice touchy-feely GUI apt program that my grandmother could use.
- a centralized way to configure all of the significant programs that tend to make up the "operating" system such as user management, mail, ftp, http, printer services, network config, hardware management and the like. NT does this fairly decently, though I think that it could be done much better.
This would, of course, require some centralized body to devise sane standards for all to follow...
Principally, philosophy and organisation. But here are some very good pragmatic reasons to use Debian:
Personally, I don't really see an issue with Potato slipping. You can still install packages from Potato; libc upgrades on Potato actually work, no messing around, no reboot. It can be a little embarrassing telling people that they have to download an extra 10MB of files to get support for their brand spanking Matrox G200, but at least the option is there.
To summarise all this: With Debian, you spend less time searching, installing and debugging software, which gives you more time to actually use it. If I really want to spend lots of time mucking around with software installation, I'll install Slackware. And if I wanted to spend lots of times debugging problems with the way software is installed, I'd install RedHat.
Dangit.. Every year it's the same thing... they promise us ;>
:P
vegetables.. and then at the last minute, they take them away.
We're hungry computer folks out here people....I don't
care if they're frozen or not... I actually prefer them piping hot...
with lots of cheese and sour cream w/chives... Yummmm
Do you think they could pass out holiday Ramen blocks in the meantime?
Mmmmm... crunchy!
Friends don't let friends buy Compaq's. (Dell/Gateway... same same) You want a good computer? Build it yourself.
As long as developers are interested (which they clearly are- Debian has a horrible backlog of developer registrations) there will be continued Debian releases. No need to fret on that count. And while these releases are slow, stable is perfectly usable for the vast majority of serious work- and for those who have stability as only priority one and not priority 1, 2, and 3, there is always potato, which has died on me only once in several months of usage on two machines. Remember, apt-get dist-upgrade is your friend, and can give you a 2.2.x system within the hour if you are on a fast connection, and overnight otherwise. :)
~luge
(BTW, methinks the release date for 2.4 is pretty optimistic too
IAAL,BIANLY
I'm running kernel 2.2.9 on my Debian-slink system along with a number of other pieces not included in the distribution, none of which comes from the 'unstable' branch. One of the things I like about Debian is it doesn't get in your way if you want to download, compile, and install your own stuff.
For those pieces I don't need the latest-greatest for, I use packages from stable- for everything else, I compile. No problem.
I -have- downloaded pieces from unstable before, but I've always been disappointed with the results, and the same with importing precompiled binaries from non-Debian sources. There's always another library to deal with. Compile yourself and you know you're linked to the library version that you have.
--Parity
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
I generally agree with everything you've said, but just a note: don't use linuxconf if you don't like it. My main desktop box runs a mishmash of RH and Mandrake packages (was originally RH5.1 IIRC) and compiled tarballs. Linuxconf is pretty much useless to me, an annoyance, and ultimately a commented line in inetd.conf. I find bash and perl scripts to be far superior to GUI tools for my uses.
"Cause there's 40 different shades of black, so many fortresses and ways to attack, so why you complainin'?"
This would A) Take up way too much room, (THESE ARE FLOPPIES!), and B) Put more duress on the system than needed. The boot floppies are to get your system up and running. Customization comes later. (Imagine placing furniture in a house before the walls are up.)
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
All that said, Also is better than OSS (and compatible!:), and is slated to replace OSS in the kernel tree sometime in the not too distant future (possibly in the 2.5 tree, but I don't know).
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak