>>>>> "Tom" == Tom Badran <tb100@doc.ic.ac.uk> writes: Tom> Hi everybody. Im a mandrake convert whos fallen in love with Tom> debian. Best installer ive used yet :) I just wanted to know what Tom> the various 'debians' (SID, woody, potatoe) people refer to. Right now, there are three stages of a release: stable, testing (currently frozen), unstable. Stable means that everything has been tested a whole lot, and should work exactly as intended. Unfortunately, it also means the packages may be older. The last stable was released two years ago (although releases usually get done more often -- between now and the last release, the "testing" mechanism was added, and we doubled the number of supported architectures). Once in a while, point releases will be made. You'll see that the current release is Debian 2.2r6, which means revision 6 of Debian 2.2. (I might be using incorrect terminology here.) These releases only fix security bugs and release-critical(?) bugs. Unstable is where all the latest and greatest gets installed. Packages can also be broken in unstable, for many reasons. It is generally recommended that you don't use unstable unless you know how to dig yourself out of a hole (or are extremely brave). After a period of testing (two weeks, as long as a new version has not been uploaded, and it has no release-critical bugs filed against it, and maybe some other conditions), packages migrate from unstable to testing. Testing is fairly stable, but once in a while (rarely), some of the packages can break. Unfortunately, testing doesn't get a whole lot of security support. Stable gets security updates, and unstable (usually) gets new versions put in right away, but for testing, you need to wait a while before security updates show up. For this reason, you should not use testing if you're worried about getting cracked, unless you're willing to recompile security updates on your own. Right now, testing is frozen, meaning that no new packages will be added, because the developers are preparing to make it stable. Each release has a code name, based on characters from Toy Story. Debian 2.2 is Potato, which is the current stable release. Debian 3.0 is Woody, which is the current testing release, and which will become stable soon. After Woody is officially released and becomes the new stable, a new name will be given to the testing release. Unstable is always called Sid, who was the evil kid next door in Toy Story. (Sid doesn't stand for "Still In Development", but no one will really care if you want to think of it like that.) There is also the experimental repository, but you don't want to go there unless you really know what you're doing. -- Hubert Chan <hubert@uhoreg.ca> - http://www.uhoreg.ca/ PGP/GnuPG key: 1024D/124B61FA Fingerprint: 96C5 012F 5F74 A5F7 1FF7 5291 AF29 C719 124B 61FA Key available at wwwkeys.pgp.net. Encrypted e-mail preferred.
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