Hello world,
First, the big news: it's my mum's birthday today. Happy birthday mum!
Second, for those who haven't already noticed:
ajt@auric:/org/ftp.debian.org/ftp/dists$ ls -l testing stable Debian3.0r0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 troup debadmin 5 Jul 19 14:41 Debian3.0r0 -> woody
lrwxrwxrwx 1 troup debadmin 5 Jul 19 14:40 stable -> woody
lrwxrwxrwx 1 troup debadmin 5 Jul 19 14:43 testing -> sarge
Third, for those of you who aren't used to leaping to conclusions based
on the output of a couple of obscurely named commands, this means the
new testing distribution is codenamed "sarge" [0], and that "woody" is
released -- the Debian GNU/Linux stable distribution is now at version
3.0. This revision began development when the "potato" entered it's
code freeze, around two and a half years ago. It includes KDE, a new
version of Gnome, Mozilla 1.0, and lots of other stuff that's already
been covered in the real announcement and the release notes. If you've
missed the real announcement, it's at:
http://www.debian.org/News/2002/20020719
Fourth, we've got a new tool for generating CDs, called "jigdo". It lets
you download most of the CD from your local Debian mirror -- which is
likely to be faster or cheaper or both. See http://cdimage.debian.org/
for some details. Note that regular .iso images won't be made available
for a couple of days, so if you want to be a really early adopter Jigdo
is the only way to go. To find your local mirror, look at
http://ftp.debian.org/README.mirrors.html
Note that by the time you read this, some mirrors won't have updated
yet. If you feel the need to update immediately enough to edit your
/etc/apt/sources.list to point at an updated mirror, I'd *strongly*
encourage you to include woody from your closest mirror as the first
line in your sources.list. If you do that, any debs that're up to date
on the local mirror will be fetched from there which will also be faster
and cheaper for everyone concerned.
Fifth, it seems to be the season for security updates. So make sure you've
got
deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main
or similar in your sources.list.
So, that just leaves all the gossip! Sweet.
(If you're a suit with a business imperative to obtain reassurance in
regard to the enterprise suitability of Debian -- don't read on :)
The traditional round of thanks, then. Over two or so years of trying to
get woody released, there's a fair number of people who've done useful
things: heck, that much time is enough for people to discover Debian, join
it, do a bunch of useful things, get bored with it, and quit. I'm going
to be lame and not even try to cover most people. You can get some vague
idea of who the people who've gotten Debian from 2.2 to 3.0 by looking at
http://www.debian.org/intro/organization
http://www.debian.org/devel/people
but it's only a vague idea at best. These releases don't happen without
all the folks who work on our 9000 or so packages, our porters, our CD
developers, our QA team, our security team, our installer developers, our
bug reporters, etc, etc. And all that excludes the other two ends that
make Debian what it is: all the people upstream who develop software we
package, and all the people who actually use it. Apparently there are
one or two people in both groups.
But you can't have a round of thanks by saying "there are too many people
to thank", coz that's just lame. So I'm going to restrict my focus to
the release task itself, and thus I get to mainly thank James Troup and
Ryan Murray. Without James' efforts over the past two years, the archive
software wouldn't be anywhere near capable of managing all the packages we
have (around 10000 all up, multiplied by 13 architectures (11 released,
one unreleased and source)) nor the complexities of the way we've tried
to handle this release (aka "testing"). Without Ryan's efforts we were
struggling to keep our packages remotely consistent across a handful
of architectures, with them, we're keeping almost a dozen highly varied
architectures almost perfectly synced with twice as many packages.
Normally I'd expect to be running through a list of people like the
port maintainers or the boot-floppy hackers or the CD people here,
but in a shocking turn of events, they all pretty much took care of
themselves. People like Adam Di Carlo and Philip Hands can get a token
mention anyway, though. Check the changelogs for the full details. Thanks,
y'all.
Thanks also to Jonathan Oxer, who fell for my blatant attempt at extortion
in my previous update [1]: he's now the official organiser of the Debian
mini-conference at linux.conf.au 2003 in Perth. So, if you're into
Debian enough to be reading this mail, and you're planning on being in
the Southern Hemisphere next January, you know what you should do.
There's actually been some criticism of my use of the woody release
to blackmail someone into hosting the mini-conf -- a number of people
have indicated that I should've demanded money too. Well, fortunately
there's still time to remedy such problems. And there'd better be, because
there's a much more serious issue that's come to light: a certain past
policy has almost certainly unfairly biassed some of the more accurate
IT polling organisations [2] against the new release.
As such, you should feel free to send a buck or two to "The Release
Manager's Beer Fund" via PayPal to ajt-woody-rocks@debian.org [3]. Your
return on investment is guaranteed!
So, that about does it. Last time around I had a couple of bits about
what went wrong with the release just gone, and some of the things that
we'll be working on for the next one, but they're complicated enough to
warrant a separate email sometime in the next week or so.
Hrm. So, what else could cause some more chaos?
I know!
IRC PARTY IN #debian ON irc.openprojects.net NOW!!!!!
Have fun. :)
Cheers,
aj
[0] sarge is named after the green toy soldier, continuing the theme of
using codenames based on characters in the animated movie _Toy Story_.
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2002/debian-devel-announce-200207/msg00005.html
[2] http://srom.zgp.org/
[3] PayPal's at www.paypal.com. I've no idea how it works. Or if it works.
If you're overly excited by all this "release" stuff, and feel an
urge to send even *more* than pocket change, look at:
http://www.spi-inc.org/donations
instead. That'll ensure your money is properly accounted for and
isn't randomly wasted.
--
Anthony Towns
Debian Release Mananger
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