Re: upgrade lombard potato to woody
On Tue, 30 Oct 2001, Andrew Sharp wrote:
> I wasn't "confused," I was hosed, and it is hardly a unique event. I
> had another machine that was quite happily working fine, and it had
> sources.list pointing to "stable." One day "stable" changed to potato
> and not long after that that machine got hosed too.
For people who want to run a particular stable distribution, and not
upgrade automatically to new stable releases: Yes, in this case you
should use the distribution name (eg potato) not the "stable" alias.
> But I am confused by this reply. I had to read it 3 times before I
> even partially got it. So, you are saying that sid and unstable will
> be pseudonyms for each other forever?
Yes.
> ... then why not just stop using the name sid, it's redundant.
Symmetry. All other releases have nicknames. By the way, the releases
are named after Toy Story characters, and Sid in particular was the
destructive kid who liked breaking things. So it's kinda cute too.
> And your perspective on the difference between woody and testing,
> well, it's a lot different than mine, I'll grant that. I tend to
> think in terms of solid, frozen releases, and the moving target of
> things in between being things like "testing" or "unstable."
Now that we have the "testing" distribution, freezes will be somewhat
different. They will work as Michael described; see the announcement at
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0008/msg00906.html for details.
Essentially, the Debian distrubution is now like a CVS repository with
multiple branches. Unstable/sid is the HEAD, where new development is
done. After being tested in unstable, changes are migrated to the current
"testing" branch. Stable releases are periodically cut from "testing".
> If you want that kind of pain, then go there. But yeah, at some point
> woody will be frozen and released, and then "stable" will be moved to
> point to it rather than to potato. Won't "testing" be then moved to
> point to sid at that time or thereabouts?
Once preparations are complete, potato will be cut from "testing," undergo
a freeze in which only major bug fixes are allowed on the branch, and then
it will be released. At this point, potato will become "stable". This
freeze will be much less intensive than in the past, because the testing
system filters out release-critical bugs and broken dependencies.
The "testing" archive will be unaffected by the release. It will continue
to be automatically updated unstable. The only change will be a new
nickname. Sid will be similarly unaffected, and will keep its name.
This means that users tracking testing or unstable will be unaffected by
the release cycle from now on. Users of stable can choose to stick with a
single distribution, or to track new stable releases.
If you're not familiar with the workings of "testing", there are some good
answers to technical questions here:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0012/msg02699.html
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0012/msg01920.html
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