Debian Maintainer Hints At September Release for Lenny

nerdyH writes "The Debian project's maintainer, Luke Claes, announced in an email Saturday that he will freeze the 'testing' or 'Lenny' tree, in preparation for a new stable release of Debian Linux in ... September! The freeze means that open source software developers have only a couple more days to package any applications that they want to be included in the next release of Debian — and by extension, in the inner sanctum source lists of distributions such as Ubuntu that are based on it. After the freeze starts next week, Debian maintainers will turn their attention to 364 release-critical bugs, and half-a-dozen high-priority goals. Given the work to be done, is September really feasible? Lenny always was a little slow getting back to his right place ..."

Re:Freeze just now?

[bh_doc]

Put simply, no. See: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/01/msg00001.html [debian.org]

Re:Obligatory "does it matter?"

[benuski]

There's now a security repository for testing, just like there is for stable, and the repos are in a default sources.list if you install testing directly. http://secure-testing-master.debian.net/ [debian.net]

Re:Obligatory "does it matter?"

[Jackmn]

Use '&gt;' and '&lt;' for '>' and '<', respectively.

Re:Obligatory "does it matter?"

[Darkforge]

I've never know invalid HTML to crash IE. I don't think I've ever know IE to take any notice of the code at all. From what I've seen, it downloads the page, strips the code, and then throws whatever is left at the screen...

It has been known to happen! http://support.microsoft.com/kb/885932 [microsoft.com] http://support.microsoft.com/kb/811751 [microsoft.com] http://support.microsoft.com/kb/913788 [microsoft.com] http://support.microsoft.com/kb/909363 [microsoft.com]

Re:Why the name "Lenny"?

[arrenlex]

All Debian releases are named after Toy Story characters. [debian.org] Lenny is a pair of binoculars with feet. [wikipedia.org]

Re:Freeze just now?

[jd]

Being confused is healthy. G95 (g95.sourceforge.net) is NOT gfortran, which is a Fortran 90 implementation, not a Fortran 95 implementation. gfortran is also listed by organizations such as NASA as not to be used due to severe bugs, with instructions to use g95 instead. Hey, I can only go by what they say. I can't access the other pages you linked to - I suspect they're now slashdotted. However, HDF5 1.8.1 is extremely stable and is the version people are supposed to be using. No idea what version of ATLAS Debian is using, but the latest stable (and yes, it is stable) version is 3.8.2. If Debian is using anything later than 3.6, I'd be surprised. MUMPS is used in specialist areas. By not including it, it obviously won't impact anyone who does use Debian since, if they needed MUMPS, Debian isn't something they'd use. It's self-fulfilling and therefore quite useless as a measure of interest. The question should be one of "if MUMPS was included, what changes would there be in the size and nature of the userbase, if any"? That is entirely different, as it does not fall into the recursive dependency trap.

Re:Obligatory "does it matter?"

[ilovegeorgebush]

What the hell are you talking about? Using Sid is fine whether you're a Debian developer or not. I've used it for years on various machines and it's never bitten me. I do development in various languages and platforms, as well as need to compile C, C++ applications.

Your comment is typically elitest, and damnright wrong.

Re:Obligatory "does it matter?"

[petermgreen]

Using stable in your sources.list is generally a bad idea. Moving from release to release should be a concious dessision done with a copy of the release notes in hand. Going in with a blind dist-upgrade often causes problems which may be tricky to recover from.

Re:Open Java

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out here:

http://packages.qa.debian.org/o/openjdk-6.html
http://release.debian.org/migration/testing.pl?package=openjdk-6

Looks like it is blocked by a new FTBFS on sparc.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Ubuntu isn't based on Testing

[ichthyoboy]

Because Ubuntu is snapshot of unstable, isn't a LTS version somekind "snapshot" from the "Stable"?

Nope...it just means that they will support it longer (security updates for 3 years for desktop, 5 years for server) than the regular releases (18 months for server and desktop). Hence the Long Term Support moniker.

Re:Ubuntu isn't based on Testing

[petermgreen]

Ubuntu is built off a snapshot of Unstable,
Not exactly, changes are auto-imported from debian unstable only for packages that don't have any ubuntu specific changes.

so I don't see how Debian's freeze will affect it.
Debian tries to keep testing and unstable pretty close to each other. Changes in unstable that are not wanted in testing can be a major PITA when bugs need to be fixed (there is another way into testing but they prefer not to use it because the packages get far less testing when they are introduced by that route).

So while unstable is not technically frozen developers are strongly discouraged from uploading stuff to unstable that are not intended to become part of lenny

Corrections...

[Maulkin]

1) It's Luk, not Luke
2) He's a Release Manager, not the Debian project's maintainer. Whatever that is.