Re: Early draft of release notes
Rob Bradford wrote:
> Any ideas for structure/content would be much appreciated.
Looks like you're doing fine on structure.
What's new in the installation system:
- debootstrap downloads and installs the base system from scratch now;
most installs won't need to fool with the base tarball, or with a ton
of floppies.
- The task system has been revamped. The selection of tasks gone over
and tightened up. It is now much easier to install only part of a
task, rather than the whole thing.
- Debconf is now the main interface users interact with during
installation and configuration of packages (potato's release notes
promised this would be so, and while there are still some holdouts,
nearly all interaction is done via debconf now).
- I suspect that the overall installed size of the base system (and thus
one of Debian's minimum system requirements) may have gone *down* from
potato, due to various space-reduction changes (especially the locales
change). If so, it'd be really cool to mention that. TODO: compare
unpacked size of potato's base.tgz with the chroot debootstrap builds.
What's new in the distribution:
- apt now has support for "pinning", which can be used to track stable,
while easily pulling selected updated packages from unstable or
testing.
- Build dependancies have been added to a great deal of the
distribution. These aid in compiling packages from source, letting you
make sure everything necessary is installed before starting the compile.
"apt-get build-dep" can be used to automatically install the necessary
packages.
- A fancy Gnome frontend has been added to debconf, and a flexible
backend database as well.
- Numerous frontends for apt have been in development throughout woody's
development cycle, and many of them are nearing a quite usable state.
- A major new release of X, version 4.0, is included, with more support
for more hardware, better hardware autodetection, etc.
- This is the first version of Debian to include a full-featured, free,
web browser (mozilla). (I think this is really significant, since this
may be the first release where most of our users don't go install
netscape from non-free to get a decent browser.)
- (The normal bragging about new versions of stuff, added packages and
cd's and so on.)
Oh, one structural note: It might be nice if some of these items were
hyperlinks to somewhere that provided more information. So you could
click on "pinning" to see the (hypothetical) apt pinning HOWTO or
whatever.
--
see shy jo
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