Re: Slink to Potato
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On Sat, 2 Oct 1999, Damir J. Naden wrote:
> Hi Brad; unless Mutt is confused, you wrote:
> > Hmmm... exactly 80-column lines, more or less. 72 or 76 is much better
> > though, it leaves room for replies.
>
> Ooops, sorry, I don't know how that happened; my vimrc files specs 76 columns,
> maybe I need separate command in muttrc?
i was partially wrong too. You have 78 column lines, not 80 ;)
As you can see the line above, with the two characters inserted for
quoting the ',' hits the very right margin of an 80-column-width display.
> > I'd think they shouldn't put stuff on the webpage until they've made the
> > decision, on debian-devel or debian-policy.
>
> Considering the changes are so big (with egcs and libc2.1 and 2.2
> kernel) that it justifies the more flexible approach (not waiting
> until _all_ the details are settled).
There is something on the webpage saying Potato will contain all those.
http://www.debian.org/releases/unstable/
Of course, this is subject to change if there's an upgrade in one of those
packages.
> And if upstream guys do their thing, we may be looking into 2.4 kernel
> pretty soon- does that mean another Debian stable release will be one
> step back ( when potato become stable it'll rely on 2.2 kernel).
Depends if potato is frozen before they get 2.4 out. Vague rumors tell of
a November target for a potato freeze, and a January release for 2.4... Of
course, being rumors, these could easily be wrong.
> Even though the debian releases and kernel are not directly linked
> (I'm running 2.2.10 on slink), it will give a wrong perception to the
> average user (like me).
How so? Besides that some people think RedHat uses kernel version 6.1, i
don't follow...
Or are you referring to the kernel being out of date, makeing users think
Debian is always far behind?
> > Remember that stable isn't just a collection of packages that work,
> > everything works together as a unified system. If you start upgrading
> > parts of that, you may end up breaking another part.
>
> Maybe we should have another directory then for up-to-date-stable,
> which all could download from at their own risk (which we do anyway,
> not like anyone is guaranteeing anything in the first place).
This has been proposed, according to other posts in this thread. IIRC, the
plan was to allow an unstable package into semi-stable only after X length
of time without bug reports, etc.
Netgod also supposedly keeps some unstable packages compiled for slink,
and i hear the Gnome people make debs for stable of their latest releases.
So this may not be too difficult to impliment (not that i'm volunteering
;)
All in all, this seems like a pretty good idea.
> People who really want rock solid system ( I like mine medium solid
> :-)) wouldn't upgrade anyways. I upgrade something (say Enlightenment
> or wmaker), and if I don't like it, I pull out old packages and
> reinstall old stuff. Thanks to Debian way of installing, I have never
> ever damaged my system by doing this (until I did something terribly
> stupid and deserved it).
Now that makes me curious what you did to break it!
Once i broke libc6-dev by deleting some important header, had to uninstall
and reinstall the package. And once i replaced a file needed by the
dynamic library linker, killing all dynamically linked progs--bash, cp,
ls, nothing IMPORTANT. Almost though i had to reinstall, but i managed
to salvage the system (i forget if with a boot disk or just running
ldconfig).
> > Besides having to deal with possible breakage, what is it that makes
> > stable better for you than unstable? Or is the possible breakage reason
> > enough (it is a good enough reason)?
>
> I am no computer wizard. And when I read about all the development
> currently going on in Linux world, people are forgetting that
> semi-commercial applications ( like StarOffice and netscape) still
> rely on libc6 and not new libc.
libc6 is the same as glibc 2. StarOffice used to depend on glibc 2.0 (as
opposed to the 2.1 in slink), but they fixed that AFAIK. Netscape has as
much trouble with 2.1 as with 2.0 AFAIK. The Netscape in potato is linked
against the libc5 compatability libraries now.
> I happen to need those apps. But, spoiled and shallow as I am, I like
> my wmaker to be at par with upstream, or my gimp or my tetex. None of
> those are close to it in stable.
Agreed. Personally, i'm willing to risk the breakage i get following
unstable. You're not, and many others aren't, which is why semi-stable
[not-quite-so-unstable i'd call it, but that's a bit long] might be a good
idea.
- --
finger for PGP public key.
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