What is the status of "stable"?
Hi folks.
What is the current stability of the "stable" distribution? Due to the
tremendous volume on all the lists, I have not read everything this
week. Have the dependencies on the unstable libc5 been fixed?
Does anything else need doing immediately to stabilize our "stable"
release?
Last weekend, I spent more than one day installing 1.2 on a laptop (for
someone else). I ended up with a system so broken that I cannot see any
way out other than to reformat. All the TeX packages are so broken that
dpkg refuses to install or uninstall them. dpkg refuses to downgrade
itself, and many of the config/setup files for dselect have been
corrupted or removed. Also, there is some kind of problem with
/usr/sbin/install-info which makes most package installations break.
I wouldn't know how or if to make any specific bug reports. The method I
used to install was strange: The single disk for 1.2 would not work on
the laptop, so I installed the 1.1 base system plus gcc, binutils, and
one or two other packages so I could compile a kernel with PCMCIA support.
I got a working 2.0.7 kernel which recognized a 28.8 modem which I used
to upgrade to 1.2. That led me to the present broken state. I only
installed the default dselect selections to start with, and tried to
install everything else I wanted on the second pass.
Unfortunately, I've been asked to install RedHat in favor of Debian for
the second attempt on this machine. I figure that learning how RedHat
works is a good idea in any case, so I will be able to take note of the
differences between their distribution and ours.
I noticed that someone suggested 2 releases per year as opposed to 3.
IMHO, this suggestion is worthy of very serious consideration. People
who want to use Debian as a stable, reliable system, would have more luck
as we could make it more stable with fewer release cycles. People who
love to live on the bleeding edge could follow the unstable distribution
to their heart's content.
Syrus.
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Syrus Nemat-Nasser <syrus@ucsd.edu> UCSD Physics Dept.
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