Re: Archive access
On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 07:42:56PM -0700, Willy Gommel wrote:
> Since your freeze began. I've been having a problem in getting any Testing
> information to download from any of your mirrors. It is most annoying, as I
> cannot upgrade anything at this time.
>
> My question is: Is this regarded as normal and necessary, or am I having a
> problem particular to the Testing/AMD64 architecture portion of each site? Or is
> this a bug that itself needs to be reported? If the latter, then please consider
> it reported.
>
> Thank you very much!!
>
> --
> Willy Gommel
> www.wg3.net
I think it's probably a consequence of the freeze - essentially, there are no
changes to the (former) Testing distribution. Testing stops accepting packages
as the freeze happens. If you have it tagged by codename, you get minimal changes
other than bugfixes at the moment in the run up to the release of Squeeze as stable.
This is another argument for using the code name of a release as your mechanism
for updates in /etc/apt/sources.list. [See below]
Sid is always unstable - never released - the backronym is "Still In Development"
Don't run sid unless you are prepared to deal with a high pace of change,
a high churn rate in terms of packages and a degree of breakage.
If you do run sid, be prepared to follow some of the developer lists within
Debian. If, for example, there's a new, incompatible release of GNOME/KDE/GCC
- KDE 3.5 -> 4.x, Gnome 2.x -> 3.x, GCC 4.x -> 5.x - then there will be huge change
which may take months to work through in stages and involve several thousand packages.
Smaller library changes may break swathes of apps, sound system changes
may involve fixes right across the board, major changes may occur as
we move kernel versions as whole subsystems break and are fixed. If you know, for example,
that a major change to KDE is coming, you can be prepared for a couple of months of large
numbers of changes on a daily basis. Could be a few GB a day on a bad day :)
Testing looks like a "bathtub curve" - lots of changes at the beginning which were waiting to be
made as the freeze occurred, a fairly constant flow through the progress towards a freeze, and a huge
number of changes/bug fixes at the end as they're knocked out in order that it's released as stable.
There will be lumps - as groups of packages come in from Sid - but they're likely to be less noticeable.
Once a release is stable, there will be security updates, there will be point releases which round these up
but there's no change. Once release+1 happens, that release may become oldstable and be supported for up to
a year.
Unstable Testing Stable Oldstable
Sid Lenny Etch [4.0] [Sarge]
Sid Squeeze [6.0] Lenny [5.0] Etch [4.0]
Sid ??? [7.0] Squeeze [6.0] Lenny [5.0]
Sid ???? [8.0] ???? [7.0] Squeeze [6.0]
Typically, releases take two years, and oldstable's there for a year or so, so you get three years.
Exceptionally, if you'd had a Lenny system tagged as
#
deb http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ lenny main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ lenny main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/ lenny/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ lenny/updates main contrib non-free
deb http://volatile.debian.org/debian-volatile lenny/volatile main contrib non-free
deb-src http://volatile.debian.org/debian-volatile lenny/volatile main contrib non-free
at the day you first knew the codename for the next release, then you'd have had five years support with no changes needed.
Otherwise, if you tag by unstable/testing/stable you end up with a flag day whenever "stable" is released
My lenny machine will age gracefully with no apparent change as stable -> oldstable - but I've then got about a year
to get round to upgrading it :)
Hope this helps,
AndyC
>
>
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