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Debian Sarge Coming Soon

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tue May 31, 2005 07:54 AM
from the believe-it-when-you-see-it dept.
Debian
daria42 writes "The long awaited 3.1 release of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution - codenamed Sarge - is due out next week on the 6th of June, according to the project's release team. Around 50 release-critical bugs remain to be fixed. One more update to Debian 3.0 will also be released prior to that date. And it's about time - the last formal release was back in July 2002. Debian 3.0 will probably be supported with security patches for another 12 months."
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  • Starting the book now... (Score:4, Funny)

    by gowen (141411) <gwowen@gmail.com> on Tuesday May 31 2005, @07:57AM (#12683081) Homepage Journal
    Who wants to enter our sweepstake for when Debian 3.2 will be released? Pick a date, and if you're the nearest, you'll win ... well, nothing.

    I take July 4th, 2007.

  • DNF? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Ibag (101144) on Tuesday May 31 2005, @07:57AM (#12683084)
    Does this mean thaat Duke Nukem Forever is coming out soon too? Or just that hell has frozen over?

  • And the point is? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by coolsva (786215) on Tuesday May 31 2005, @07:57AM (#12683086)
    Not to troll, but what is the main advantage of sarge vis-a-vis other distributions based on the debian unstable/testing tree (like knoppix/ubunto and a dozen other main ones)

    • Re:And the point is? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by jhdevos (56359) on Tuesday May 31 2005, @08:02AM (#12683114) Homepage
      More supported arch's? Security support for the entire distribution, not just a subset?

      Jan

    • Re:And the point is? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 31 2005, @08:21AM (#12683244)
      1) It guarantees a clean upgrade path for people still running 3.0.

      One of the nice things about Debian is you don't need to reinstall. Most of the problems you experience upgrading testing/unstable every day have been ironed out for anyone attempting the mammoth 3.0->3.1 upgrade.

      2) It will continue to do this.

      Third party distros come and go. Progeny? Corel? Ubuntu is developing at lightning pace right now, but as it diverges from Debian and acquires legacy maintenance baggage of its own development will slow. Sometimes users are abandoned. I believe this happens frequently to RedHat users.

      3) It's really really stable and it's really really big.

      Other distros shotgun packages as well as architectures. They're also not necessarily as anal about bugs.

      4) It's a concrete base and point of reference for third party distros.

      Debian Testing has basically been a slow moving Debian Stable (without Security support) for the whole last year. With the release out the way Testing will become more unstable again for a while and third party distros will likely base their efforts on stable again for a while. It's important for Debian's future that this is made possible.
      • No, Debians QA process is more like "If there aren't any RC bug reports it gets included", unless there was some major change latly Debian doesn't test each and every package, which for less seldomly used packages means that even a completly non-working one (SEGFAULT at startup) can slip into a stable distribution, not much an issue of x86, but for the other archs there is quite a bit of stuff that will compile, but not work.

  • good stuff... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by professorhojo (686761) * on Tuesday May 31 2005, @07:57AM (#12683087)
    Releasing Sarge will be hugely cathartic for Debian, it will get a monkey off of their back so they can move forward on the reduced platform list.

    People need to remember that Debian is not trying to be Fedora or Gentoo. There are already numerous distros providing the bleeding edge with various degrees of config assistance/packaging options etc. Debian is offering the "must work" (as opposed to "just work" which seems less mission-critical) alternative, and its useful for someone to perform the heavy testing and fixing they do.

    I am satisfied that the Debian crowd is making moves to keep itself relevant with a new team leader, a new set of targets, and a release in the bag. Having been burned in the past by the "maybe it works" distros in the past, I will be seriously considering their future offerings.

    On a slightly related tangent: just who do those Ubuntu guys think they are? They are releasing a Distro that claims to be Debian compatible, and yet their packages are not 3.5 years old. What's worse, they seem to be a popular distro. If this doesn't stop, we might have to cooperate with someone else in the Debian space! We might end up like (gasp!) Fedora, and have to deal with multiple repositories in a Bazaar-like fashion instead of doing things in the Cathedral-like fashion that we are accustomed to. Where will it all end?

      • Re:good stuff... (Score:4, Informative)

        by snorklewacker (836663) on Tuesday May 31 2005, @09:29AM (#12683812)
        > ubuntu is focused on desktops, for which bleeding edge is OK

        Only Debian could call six months of feature freeze from Debian's unstable repository to be "bleeding edge". It's the same release cycle as fedora, except nothing ever gets upgraded but for security patches. Firefox is still at 1.02 even though every security patch has been backported (which makes it exactly 1.04) because of the phobia of changing version numbers lest something break.

        Now on the pro- side: I was going to switch to Fedora myself, but these folks can't even be bothered to support my very common network hardware in their installer or port the ATI drivers to the current and only kernel version they support. Debian might move as slow as the tides, but they do lift all ships.

  • What they don't tell you... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Darren Winsper (136155) on Tuesday May 31 2005, @07:58AM (#12683089) Homepage
    ...is that the original release date was around 33 B.C.

  • Wow ! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I can see herds of pigs flying over a completely frozen hell!
  • Could someone tell me how long until this trickles into the debian based distros?

    Thanks!

  • Too late.. welcome Ubuntu... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by guyfromindia (812078) on Tuesday May 31 2005, @07:59AM (#12683097) Homepage
    which runs on my desktop, at the moment.. after being 4 yrs with Debian..
    • Well, if you were running stable on your desktop, you do not understand its purpose. Even if this release is reasonably current *now*, it'd still be a mistake to put it on your desktop.

      Brief mapping debian <-> reality:

      Stable - Server
      Testing - Desktop
      Unstable - Testing

      I've been running debian testing now for a long time. The only open service on my box is openssh, and I can pay attention to any security fixes for that one myself. For a desktop, that is really the only concern. Application vunerabili

  • Follow the RC-bug count! (Score:5, Informative)

    by jhdevos (56359) on Tuesday May 31 2005, @07:59AM (#12683099) Homepage
    here: http://bts.turmzimmer.net/details.php [turmzimmer.net]

    The June 6 date still depends on how fast the level will drop -- at the time of writing, it is at 17 RC bugs, it will have to be at 0 on June 3, so they have some work to do.

    Security support is already in place, though, so there is not really a reason to hold off upgrading :)

    Jan

  • etch is next (Score:5, Informative)

    by cyber_rigger (527103) on Tuesday May 31 2005, @08:00AM (#12683103) Homepage Journal
    http://www.debian.org/releases/etch/index [debian.org]

  • Fedora Core 4 (Score:4, Informative)

    by mukund (163654) on Tuesday May 31 2005, @08:02AM (#12683115) Homepage
    Fedora Core 4 is also scheduled for June 6 [redhat.com].

  • Recently announced, Munich has choosen Debian (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MarkEst1973 (769601) on Tuesday May 31 2005, @08:04AM (#12683124)
    Munich, if you didn't know, is making a much publicized switch from Windows NT to Linux. They recently (April 18, 2005) announced to use a customized distribution of Debian for the 14,000 city desktops.

    You can read more about it here: Munich chooses Debian [zdnet.com.au]

        • It could still happen in the (for Munich currently perhaps still not too likely case) of a change in local government. While the Social Democrats and Greens who currently rule in Munich are much in favour of the Linux migration, the Christian Democrats who currently are winning out all over Germany are definitely not.

  • Only 12 months security support of old releases? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Tillmann (859300) on Tuesday May 31 2005, @08:04AM (#12683127)
    Hi,

    only 12 months of security support for the old Debian release, after a new release has come out?

    Isn't that a bit short? If Microsoft had stopped supporting Windows 2000 in 2002 (one year after Windows XP came out), everybody would have gone NUTS about it.

    Considering that Debian "stable" is targeted at users who are very conservative about upgrades, Woody should be supported for at least a few more years. IMHO.

    bye,
    Till
    • Yes, but I've paid for Windows 2000. I can move to sarge for free with a simple dist-upgrade.
    • It's just a matter of issuing "apt-get dist-upgrade" on the console, and your Woody box will became a Sarge box.

      Sarge is the new stable, the migration should be transparent on most installations. For those few installations that are so customised, or that had some kind of problem, they're giving a 12 month period to adjust and migrate.

      Debian is not like Windows, you don't have to do a full installation to upgrade you system. The upgrades are a natural path if you keep your systems up-to-date with the repositories. That is one reason I love to use Debian.

      • Testing before deployment takes time (Score:4, Interesting)

        by DragonHawk (21256) on Tuesday May 31 2005, @11:28AM (#12684922) Homepage Journal
        "It's just a matter of issuing "apt-get dist-upgrade" on the console..."

        For individuals who don't have anything major to loose or anything special to worry about, sure. But not for large organizations with a support structure (help desk, local docs, procedures, etc.) that needs to be ramped up to support new changes. And not for anyone doing anything special or mission-critical that needs to test things before deployment. The rule in any production environment is "Test, test, test, and then test some more". You simply cannot just type "apt-get dist-upgrade" (or "yum upgrade" or any other variation on the theme) in the Real World, I'm afraid.

        In general, I find that this whole concept (which is a major part of the disipline called "configuration management") appears to be alien to Debian people. When your business/mission is on the line, answers like "Just pull from sid" or "Just apt-get the fix" and so on just don't cut it.
        • For individuals who don't have anything major to loose or anything special to worry about, sure. But not for large organizations with a support structure (help desk, local docs, procedures, etc.) that needs to be ramped up to support new changes. And not for anyone doing anything special or mission-critical that needs to test things before deployment. The rule in any production environment is "Test, test, test, and then test some more". You simply cannot just type "apt-get dist-upgrade" (or "yum upgrade" o
        • That's interesting, because OpenBSD only provides support for releases for 1 year, too. Some guy was making a big stink about it in the slashdot article on the latest release. I suppose I could spend the time to see how long FreeBSD provides free support, but I'm pretty sure it's going to be roughly the same.

          Agreed on the whole 'too cumbersome to become a debian dev', though. I started the process once but gave up before I got too far. However, I don't see what being called a developer vs. committer ha

  • What I like Debian for (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DrXym (126579) on Tuesday May 31 2005, @08:07AM (#12683141)
    I started playing around with colinux (a user mode Linux that runs on Win32) and needed a root_fs. Lo and behold I found a debian 3.0 root_fs. This was enough to get me going, but the packages are really ancient. So next I changed all the sources to Sarge, and grew a beard while updating. Now I have a spiffy Debian 3.1 all running at something like 90% native under Win32!

    The only problem was getting networking going, but that was more to do with colinux and the pain with trying to create TAP devices on Win32. I sure hope that MS ship with TAP-Win32 in their next release. They really, really should.

  • number of RC bugs to fix (Score:4, Informative)

    by jdowland (764773) on Tuesday May 31 2005, @08:07AM (#12683144)
    Hmm 50 is an over-estimate (maybe it wasn't when the story was submitted); according to http://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/ [debian.org] there are only 28.

  • Preventing some Debian trolling (Score:5, Informative)

    by rhymesmith (528299) on Tuesday May 31 2005, @08:07AM (#12683145) Homepage

    To prevent some Debian trolling I want to clarify some facts about the release model used by the Debian project.

    Debian always provides a stable distribution. This distribution is guaranteed to, yes you guessed it, be stable. That is if you install Debian stable on a server you know that you won't have to update configuration files because the application has changed its internal format and suchlike.

    This does not mean that the stable distribution is never updated, in fact Debian has a security team that fixes security bugs and backports security fixes from newer versions of a package.

    The stable distribution has a quite slow release cycle, but there is no reason for a desktop user to run the stable distribution. You can run either the unstable distribution, that regardless of its name is quite stable, or you can run the testing distribution.

    The unstable and testing distributions have really large collections of packages and are updated each day, updating your distribution is as simple as typing:

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

    A desktop user can also opt to run a Debian-derivative like Ubuntu.

    • The stable distribution has a quite slow release cycle, but there is no reason for a desktop user to run the stable distribution. You can run either the unstable distribution, that regardless of its name is quite stable, or you can run the testing distribution.

      There is a sad reason to not run testing: the testing distribution is the last one to get security updates; as I have understood this, unsecure packages from unstable can overwrite security fixed packages in testing. And I've seen people at debian-d

        • Rolling distros are perfect for boys living at their parent's basament which think they have a life because they know what the last version of KDE or Gnome or whatever program is.

          They're also excellent for working professionals that prefer frequent and non-invasive minor upgrades to less frequent world-moving major upgrades. Rolling upgrades mean never having to reinstall from scratch and they also mean that application and desktop changes come in small, manageable chunks.

          Rolling distros also allow

  • Hooray! (Score:3, Funny)

    by fr0dicus (641320) on Tuesday May 31 2005, @08:08AM (#12683155) Journal
    Finally I can upgrade my kernel:

    Linux debian 2.4.18-bf2.4 #1 Son Apr 14 09:53:28 CEST 2002 i686 GNU/Linux

  • The new installer (Score:4, Insightful)

    by dmouritsendk (321667) on Tuesday May 31 2005, @08:17AM (#12683215)
    Does anybody know if it will allow creation of LVM2 volumes during install?

  • Finally (Score:5, Informative)

    by petteri_666 (745343) on Tuesday May 31 2005, @08:21AM (#12683243)
    After Sarges release there will be nice new things coming to unstable:
    KDE 3.4
    GNOME 2.10
    gcc 4.0
    xorg 6.8.2
    python 2.4

    Long live Debian ;)

  • instead of sarge.... (Score:4, Funny)

    by flacco (324089) on Tuesday May 31 2005, @08:59AM (#12683550)
    ...they should have named this release "Godot".

  • The actual notice (Score:3, Informative)

    by Mr_Person (162211) <mr_person@nosPaM.mrperson.org> on Tuesday May 31 2005, @09:30AM (#12683815) Journal
    For those of you that are curious, the actual email that Andi Barth sent out is here [debian.org].

  • Debian is Different (Score:3, Funny)

    by DaGoodBoy (8080) on Tuesday May 31 2005, @09:46AM (#12683968) Homepage
    Debian is a different kind of distribution compared to other popular distros. I wrote an essay on these differences here [awtrey.com] if anyone is interested. Bottom line in the essay; Debian continues to be more important as a community collection of tools and knowledge for building and distributing an operating system than as a standalone distro itself.

    The Sarge release is great, but Debian's success is also in its franchisees. I remember a press conference where one of the marketing types predicted that there would eventually only be two major distributions. Robin 'roblimo' Miller piped up and burst his grand vision by asking 'Debian and who?' He got a laugh and made a point that continues to be made today. Debian is a fantastic laboratory to grow operating systems and the knowledge on how it happens is right there in its mailing lists, utilities and documentation.

    Go Debian!

    DaGoodBoy

  • It needs to be voiced (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jackstack (618328) on Tuesday May 31 2005, @10:17AM (#12684251) Journal
    While many complain about the long cycle time for major debian releases, I'd just like to voice the opinion that I *like*.. no *LOVE*...the fact that it doesn't change often.

    As a hobbyist - I really enjoy *using* linux to serve webpages for recreational use, mp3s, ssh sessions, downloading torrents and learning about unix.

    If I have to keep up with a continual stream of what I feel to be cosmetic and superfluous updates, that leaves me less time to do the things I enjoy. As far as security updates, debian does a great job of notifying users of security updates with their mailing list, debian-security-announce. When ever I get an e-mail from that list - I just run apt-get update and apt-get dist-upgrade, and all is well.

    Then again, I'm the type of person who takes great delight in installing linux on a crusty old (but wireless enabled) laptop with no X and just alt-F[1-4]'ing for my 'window environment'. I don't *need* the latest release of gwingding or kflipflop depending on the latest libraries of whatever, so I am probably in the minority here.

    • Re:This has taken much too long. (Score:4, Informative)

      by KiloByte (825081) on Tuesday May 31 2005, @08:14AM (#12683193)
      Three years between point releases, 3.0 -> 3.1, is just much too long to wait.

      There were 5 point releases since Woody.
      The step between Woody and Sarge is similar to those between Win95 and Win98 -- and just like products of the Evil Empire, the gap is three years.

      Having a release every a couple of months is good for a desktop-only release with all the newest bells and whistles -- but for a server, I expect something that can be installed and largely forgotten.

    • Re:This has taken much too long. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Sinus0idal (546109) on Tuesday May 31 2005, @08:15AM (#12683195)
      Yes those are the STABLE releases, and it takes that long to ensure that they are STABLE. When Sarge is released most of its packages will already be out of date, but STABLE. If you want to use debian on the desktop, do a minimal stable install, change your apt.sources to unstable, and do a dist-upgrade and install the packages you want. You'll end up with your ubuntu/knoppix'y type desktop system with up to date releases.

      I wish people would stop moaning about stable! It isn't a desktop distro! It is for those that want to do an 'apt-get install apache' and KNOW it won't fail. That means a lot to admins.
      • There is also the problem that even Debian Sid doesn't get updated once the freeze starts. In Sarge's case the initial "freeze" started late in 2003. So while some packages have been updated since then you end up still not having any version of Xorg in Sarge. Also there are no Gnome 2.10, or KDE 3.4 packages in unstable either since it has to be stablized in unstable so that it can go into testing for eventual release.

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