[vox-tech] Debian Woody Officially Released

[Ken Bloom]

>
>
>---ORIGINAL MESSAGE---
>Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2002 21:30:48 -0700
>To: vox-tech@lists.lugod.org
>Subject: Re: [vox-tech] Debian Woody Officially Released
>From: Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com>
>Reply-To: vox-tech@lists.lugod.org
>
>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.)
>
>  
>
I may be totally wrong about this (as I don't yet use debian myself -  I 
just decided to switch)

Doesn't this mean that anybody who was running Debian stable last week 
got upgraded (or will get upgraded) from potato to woody now (or did 
potato releases refer to themselves as "potato" for upgrade purposes)? 
This seems like it would be of rather large importance to anybody 
administering or using systems that run Debian stable.

And doesn't this mean that as people using testing change from woody to 
sarge, that packages will start getting replaced somewhat faster as 
testing is no longer in the frozen state? I imagine that this would 
include immediately a whole spate of packages that were backlogged from 
inclusion right at the end of the freeze.