Debian Lenny and release dates

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 02:20:23AM -0400, JoeHill wrote:
> 
> Saw this article just now:
> 
> http://www.tectonic.co.za/?p=3312
> 
> Not really concerned that 'Debian is in trouble', but I am curious about how
> the releases work.

Once in a while, debian manages to get the critical bug count very low,
and any remaining packages with bugs that are not that important are
kicked out of the release.  Then the release is declared stable, and the
previous stable release is named old-stable.  A new testing release (The
next one I believe is to be named Squeeze or something like that) is
then named based on the new stable release.  Lots of tested packages
without known bugs in unstable are then let in to testing, and
development continues for a few more years until once again a stable
release happens.  In the past there was no testing, and the elimination
of bugs had to happen in unstable until it was in a state that could be
released.  That was hard and painful and held up new development.  I
think testing started after the release of 2.2.

> If I am running Lenny, and want to maintain a system that always has relatively
> up to date software (not necessarily bleeding edge), what is the process to
> follow when Lenny finally is finally released? Is that a 'dist-upgrade', or is
> that only for going, say, from Lenny to Sid?

dist-upgrade is the only proper way to ever upgrade.  The upgrade option
is pretty much useless as it refuses to install anything new or remove
anything old, which during development is often necesary.  The only
place plain upgrade tends to work is getting security updates on a
stable release.

Oh and going to Sid should only be done by those that know what they are
doing, since Sid is the unstable development branch.  Sid is never going
to be a stable release.  After all Sid was the kid in Toy Story that
tortured and broke all the toys.

> Sorry if I sound thick, but I've been doing clean installs of Mandriva releases
> every year or so for a long time, having trouble wrapping my head around this
> new scheme.

New scheme?  It's been going on this way for well over a decade.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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