Debian Woody Nearing Release

willybur submits word of this Debian Planet story on the upcoming release of its next stable version. The article says: "According to Anthony Towns (our beloved Release Manager), woody is nearing release. All but three RC base bugs are fixed now, and the bugsquashing party is working through the RC bugs in standard. It's not all good news though. The bad news is that this means we're probably releasing soon, and that of the hundreds of less important packages with RC bugs (eg, bugzilla, craft, crossfire-{client,server}, epic4, fvwm95, gmc, gnome-admin, intuitively, kdepim, moon-lander, tkdesk, wine, and xosview) will be getting randomly ripped out of testing ... Check the stuff that's important to you and get it fixed before it's too late." Says willybur: "See the announcement on debian-devel-announce."

Better Late

[Aknaton]

Of all the Linux distributions out there, I think that I like Debian the best. I also really like the fact that they are more concerned with quality then being there with the newest toys on the block.

Re:Kernel version?

[Anonymous Coward]

All I can say is this: I'm deeply disappointed they aren't using a 2.4 kernel. I'm a debian potato devotee. Going to woody, and staying with the 2.2 kernel is a letdown.

Re:Kernel version?

[Shiny Metal S.]

That's insightful [slashdot.org] and informative [slashdot.org] indeed, but wrong. Why won't you just check [debian.org] it? You can use "2.4.16 or .17", they're in binary base packages [debian.org] and have been for some time now.

Re:Kernel version?

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole issue is that woody defaults to 2.2.x. You could probably use a 2.5.x kernel as well. The whole point is that in about two years or whenever woody's successor is announced, people will still be installing woody distros with 2.2 kernels.

Woody is going to be obsolete the day it is released. The day after people will already be pointing endusers to testing because it's a public secret that stable really stands for seriously out of date.

Re:Why is it...

[GigsVT]

Why is it that every time there is a release announcement, this same lame joke gets modded up?

Blah...

Re:There are no `version 4' RPMs

[Jay Carlson]

I don't care what a particular implementation of RPM will install. The implementation is not standardized. I care about the format. Let me demonstrate to you that v4 RPMs exist:

nop@family-values:/tmp$ wget ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/7.2/en/os/i3 86/RedHat/RPMS/ash-0.3.7-2.i386.rpm

[...]

nop@family-values:/tmp$ od -t x1 ash-0.3.7-2.i386.rpm | head -1
0000000 ed ab ee db 04 00 00 00 00 01 61 73 68 2d 30 2e

You will note the "04 00" after the magic number. Is this accusation still unjustified?

The place I first saw these in the wild was source RPMs. In several cases, I've gotten SRPMs that I could not extract due to version mismatches. (Extraction of SRPMs is not a LSB issue, however.)

I'm not complaining that Red Hat was not a good player in the LSB standardization process; I've no reason to think otherwise. I'm complaining about the attitude that "interoperability with Red Hat" is an important goal for Debian or other distros. It's more important to interop via standards, not testing against a perceived market leader.

Re:OMG

[Anonymous Coward]

is any more proof needed that Slashdot is a site for gay homosexuals?

As opposed to the other kind?

Debian isn't out-of-date

[Dwonis]

Debian is the Linux distribution with the shortest release cycle in the world: it is released daily. After a few years, some people take a collection of packages that are known to be very solid, hack together an installation system for them, cut a CD, and call it "Debian stable".

Anyone who says Debian is out of date is just wrong.