Re: Version and Release
On Wed, 8 Jun 2016 13:28:16 +0200
"c.holper@ades.at" <c.holper@ades.at> wrote:
> AAhhhh... I see.
> That makes perfect sense.
>
A bit more information: there is generally a release about every two
years. About eighteen months after a release, testing is 'frozen', in
that no new package versions will be added without good reason and
considerable discussion, and the priority shifts to clearing the
release-critical bugs ready for the next release.
https://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/
https://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/graph.png
Before the freeze, testing isn't too far removed from unstable, in
general a new package in unstable which does not show serious problems
within about two weeks will be moved on into testing.
After the freeze, unstable continues to advance, but without any
serious architecture changes. People who continuously use testing will
receive six months' worth of new packages immediately after a release,
but the upgrade should occur without problems. Now unstable can receive
larger changes which can be accepted one by one, but which would risk
the big testing upgrade failing if they had already been in unstable
at release time. Immediately after release, both testing and unstable
become somewhat interesting to use...
The main priority of Debian is that every stable version can be
upgraded in-place to the next version, and lower priorities are that
both testing and unstable should remain usable at all times. These are
different goals to those of most other distributions, and are the
reason why Debian software versions are sometimes fairly old. Knoppix,
for example, though based on Debian, is explicitly described as
non-maintainable, and when a new version is released, you throw the old
one away. This is an important issue for servers, where a from-scratch
installation and restoration of configurations into different software
versions can be a large job. Upgrade of a Debian server is not exactly
a routine matter, but it is generally all over in an hour, usually with
only a few minutes offline.
--
Joe
Reply to: