[vox-tech] Debian Woody Officially Released

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Matt Roper (matt@mattrope.com):

> Anybody who uses Debian will probably be happy to hear that Woody (3.0)
> was officially released today and replaces Potato as the "stable"
> distribution.  Only two and a half months late...

To reiterate what I said on vox some months back, there are
substantively three Debian branches, which exist all the time and are
"released" multiple times daily in the sense of being incrementally
improved, a few packages each day:  stable, testing, and unstable.

Yesterday, my boxes were Debian-testing = "woody"/3.0.  Today, without
changing anything at all, they because Debian-testing = "sarge".  
Total number of changed packages between yesterday and today happened to
be zero.  (There are usually one or two on my boxes.)

  cthulhu:~# apt-get dist-upgrade
  Reading Package Lists... Done
  Building Dependency Tree... Done
  Calculating Upgrade... Done
  0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0  not upgraded.
  cthulhu:~# 

But the point is that, from the viewpoint of running systems, your news
we're supposed to be "happy" about amounted to no change at all:
Systems that were running Debian-stable yesterday are still running
Debian-stable.  Those running Debian-testing yesterday are still 
running Debian-testing.  And the bleeding-edge people who were running
Debian-unstable ("sid") aren't bleeding any more or less than they were
yesterday.

Basically, the only people affected are those using installation-disk 
sets, and all this means is that they can now get official sets instead
of unofficial ones.  Which probably work about the same as they did
yesterday, actually.


You want to _really_ see what the news item means?  Look here at 
ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/ (using a real ftp client that shows
symlinks, not a Web browser):

lrwxrwxrwx  1 1176  1176    6 Jul 12 19:49 Debian2.2r7 -> potato
lrwxrwxrwx  1 1176  1176    5 Jul 19 20:22 Debian3.0r0 -> woody
-rw-rw-r--  1 1176  1176  400 Jul 19 18:44 README
lrwxrwxrwx  1 1176  1176   23 Jul 19 20:22 old-proposed-updates -> potato-proposed-updates
lrwxrwxrwx  1 1176  1176    6 Jul 19 20:22 oldstable -> potato
drwxr-xr-x  5 1176  1176 4096 Jul 12 16:16 potato
drwxrwsr-x  2 1176  1176 8192 Jul 19 19:52 potato-proposed-updates
lrwxrwxrwx  1 1176  1176   22 Jul 19 20:22 proposed-updates -> woody-proposed-updates
drwxrwsr-x  5 1176  1176 4096 Jul 19 19:52 sarge
drwxrwsr-x  5 1176  1176 4096 Jul 19 19:52 sarge-proposed-updates
drwxrwsr-x  5 1176  1176 4096 Jul 19 19:52 sid
lrwxrwxrwx  1 1176  1176    5 Jul 19 20:22 stable -> woody
lrwxrwxrwx  1 1176  1176    5 Jul 19 20:22 testing -> sarge
lrwxrwxrwx  1 1176  1176   22 Jul 19 20:22 testing-proposed-updates -> sarge-proposed-updates
lrwxrwxrwx  1 1176  1176    3 Dec 15  2001 unstable -> sid
drwxrwsr-x  5 1176  1176 4096 Jul 19 19:03 woody
drwxrwsr-x  5 1176  1176 4096 Jul 19 19:52 woody-proposed-updates


Basically, all they did was repoint those symlinks, overnight.  
Yesteday, it was:

   stable -> potato
   testing -> woody
   unstable -> sid

That's pretty much all that happened, along with taking a snapshot of
the state of woody at that moment, to pass to CD-duplicators as the 
Official Debian 3.0r0 snapshot image.

(Remember, CDs are just a convenience:  Debian is defined by what's on
the package mirrors, which changes incrementally daily.)

-- 
Cheers,            There are only 10 types of people in this world -- 
Rick Moen          those who understand binary arithmetic and those who don't.
rick@linuxmafia.com