[vox-tech] Debian Woody Officially Released

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Matt Roper (matt@mattrope.com):

> I'm well aware of how Debian releases work, but you're overlooking a
> couple of important points when you say that the woody release means "no
> change at all."  The stable branch of Debian _is_ widely used by people
> running servers because those people need to be up to date on security
> fixes, but don't want to be following a moving target.

I distinction that makes no difference:  The stable branch was only
incrementally changed from what it was the day before, exactly as the
testing branch was.  From the perspective of a running system's admin,
it was Debian-stable one day, and still Debian-stable the next day.
The fact that it automatically followed the symlink from stable = potato
to stable = woody is intellectually interesting, but the admin probably
wouldn't even notice unless he read Slashdot.

> Debian's testing branch does have an excellent track record, but since
> it is constantly changing, it is not the appropriate choice for many
> server admins.

Irrelevant to my point.

> I run sid on all of my desktops....

Braver than I am.  I used to, and _boy_ was I glad when "testing"
emerged as a third alternative.   ;->

> ...but I also had some servers running potato....

In a functional sense, you had them running _stable_.  Guess what?
They're still running stable.  Get the point?

> But even if you don't run any servers under the stable branch, this
> release is still something to be happy about because it will make it
> easier to attract other people to Debian.

Non-sequitur, I'm afraid.  I'll elaborate:

> I know a lot of people used to reject Debian because they saw how
> horribly out of date stable (potato) was compared to other
> distributions.

Guess what?  Stable will always be "horribly out of date".  It's a
consequence of stable's defining characteristic.  Those people who
"rejected Debian" should have run "testing", not "stable".

My point?  If you advised such people to "wait for woody to be
released", you did them no favour, in my view.  You should have advised
them to use whatever media will install onto their hardware, then
apt-get directly onto the "testing" track, since that's the sort of
balance between leading edge and stability they're looking for.

The obvious installation media would have probably been one of the 
woody / 3.0 CD images or boot-floppy sets.

> Even when it was explained to them that they could upgrade to woody or
> sid very easily, they still thought the process sounded convoluted and
> rejected Debian without giving it a try.

The cure for stubborn ignorance is education, not a substitute delusion.

> This will finally change now that Woody has inherited the "stable"
> title.

Wanna bet?  "Stable" has _always_ been out of date, and will always be
out of date, as an automatic consequence of the Debian Policy criteria
for package release on that branch.

> Finally, some maintainers haven't even been putting packages in sid
> while waiting for woody to stabilize (I think KDE3 might fall into this
> category--the KDE maintainer is only making debs available at an
> external location).  

That is _not_ correct.  KDE3 official packages are awaiting release of
XFree86 4.2 ones, which have build problems on some of the 11 supported
architectures.  You may want to check from time to time near the bottom
of my Debian Tips file, http://linuxmafia.com/debian/tips .

-- 
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