[vox-tech] Debian Woody Officially Released

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Ken Bloom (kabloom@ucdavis.edu):

> Doesn't this mean that anybody who was running Debian stable last week 
> got upgraded (or will get upgraded) from potato to woody now....?

Yes.  Good point.

That is, people did, who had lines in /etc/apt/sources.list like this:

deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ stable main non-free contrib
deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US stable/non-US main contrib non-free

...instead of like this:

deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ potato main non-free contrib
deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US potato/non-US main contrib non-free

The latter people are now tracking a basically discontinued branch, at
this point.  Which is (from my perspective) a rather silly thing to do.

The point is that the same considerations that impelled you to want
to run Debian-stable = potato last week will probably motivate you to 
want to run Debian-stable = woody this week.  The criteria for inclusion
is the same, the mind-numbing conservatism is the same.  What's changed
is the date on the calendar.

I'd say that a large part of the _point_ of the package-distribution
system and the underlying application of Debian Policy is to acknowledge
and manage incremental software change.  You want to be running
_today's_ best attempt to meet a particular set of inclusion criteria.
"Stable" has one set of criteria, "testing" has another.  "Unstable"...
is unstable.  ;->

> This seems like it would be of rather large importance to anybody 
> administering or using systems that run Debian stable.

Let's make this concrete rather than theoretical, OK?

For some damned reason I can't presently fathom, let's say I am still in
2002 running a server on Debian-stable.  (I don't.  The "testing" branch 
supplanted it.)  Yesterday, I set down to do my weekly resync:

 # apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade

Whoa!  I notice that it wants to upgrade 58 of my 230 packages, instead
of the usual three or so (and asks me "Y/n?").  I check Debian Weekly
News and look at the symlinks on ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/ .
Ah, that explains it.

Well, I check my backups.  Maybe I halt the command and do this sort of
thing to make it easy to reconstruct my current system if need be:

 # dpkg --get-selections >selections.txt
 # COLUMNS=150 dpkg -l > packages.txt

And then I go back, start "script" to capture screen output if I want to
be ultra-cautious, and say "Y".  A whole lot of stuff.  My machine state
is basically carried forward, old daemons stop, new daemons start.  I 
check everything.  It's happy, and I go home, or it's not, and I revert
to backup.

> 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?

Well, I would certainly hope so.  But the point is that the same
criteria for inclusion per Debian Policy applies as before.  If I 
had cause to want to run Debian-testing then, the same reasons will
presumably impell me to want to run Debian-testing now.  

I haven't suddenly changed my mind and decided, say, that as of Friday,
July 19, I would much rather run Debian-stable.

> I imagine that this would include immediately a whole spate of
> packages that were backlogged from inclusion right at the end of the
> freeze.

If this were in violation of the inclusion criteria, that would be bad. 
However, since those criteria are applied by a _script_, there's not a 
whole lot of danger of that.  ;->

http://people.debian.org/~jules/testingfaq.html

-- 
Cheers,                                     The Viking's Reminder:
Rick Moen                                   Pillage first, _then_ burn.
rick@linuxmafia.com