Re: Why Woody?

[Olaf Meeuwissen <olaf@epkowa.co.jp>]

"Nick" <nickmessenger@madasafish.com> writes:

> Alot of you on this mailing list have told me to stay with Woody rather
> than upgrade to Potato because Woody will eventually be the stable
> version.
> What is the major difference between Woody and Potato, why is Woody
> better than Potato?
>  
> I am confused now, I spent a few hours downloading Potato 2.2r5 to
> upgrade Woody 2.2r3 with the view of having the most stable release but
> from what I have been told through this mailing list this is not the
> case so I am now reluctant to install Potato even though on the download
> page it does say it is stable.

There are three branches in the Debian distribution: stable, testing
and unstable.  Currently, these canonical names map to the code names
potato, woody and sid.  That is, potato is the same as stable as of
writing, woody is the same as testing.

The release number for potato is 2.2r6, as of writing.  Every now and
then security and other important fixes are integrated in the stable
release.  Whenever this happens the digit after the r is increased.
Until about a week ago potato's release number was 2.2r5.
  # Note that all security upgrades are available via
  #   deb http://security.debian.org stable/updates main

The release number for woody will be 3.0.  Whenever security and other
important fixes are integrated, it will be 3.0r1, 3.0r2, etc.

While potato is currently the stable release, it has been released
such a long time ago that many consider it almost obsolete.  Hence the
advice to stick with woody.  Although this is Debian's testing branch,
it is very stable (and rumoured to be releasable around the beginning
of next May, meaning it will become the stable branch).  I have been
using it for over a year now without major trouble.

If I were you, I'd stick with woody and forget about potato.  Chances
are that your hardware is better supported by woody anyway.  Your apt
sources.list (for woody) should look something like:

  deb http://security.debian.org stable/updates main
      # yes that's stable/updates, there are no security updates for
      # testing or unstable
  deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian woody main
      # replace with the mirror of your choice

HTH,
-- 
Olaf Meeuwissen                            Epson Kowa Corporation, CID
GnuPG key: 6BE37D90/AB6B 0D1F 99E7 1BF5 EB97  976A 16C7 F27D 6BE3 7D90
LPIC-2               -- I hack, therefore I am --                 BOFH


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-laptop-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org