Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Debian stable or testing? apt-get or yum? etc.

21: Re: Debian stable or testing? apt-get or yum? etc. (response to 1)

Posted by Luigi Martini on 04/20/04 11:47 PM

[Libranet]
It's not really clear what you end up with once you're installed.

They say you get a 100% debian woody + an "adminmenu" tool which let you easily do something that expert people do by hand. I tried it, and it seems true: skilled technicians will laugh at me, but I was happy to find such a thing inside my pc.

Can you easily update from the official Debian package repositories, or are you locked into Libranet somehow?

Try and read here: www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=5061: it was the only manual I followed, and was far enough for me to install debian.
They say that by using some apt-get command you can easily do many things: update software packages, switch to sarge and sid, and other things.
Personally, I didn't understand the difference between woody/sarge/sid yet. The people at the debian.org site think they explained it clearly. Anyway, I did not understand. So, for the moment I do not care, and will be content with what I have.

22: Re: Debian stable or testing? apt-get or yum? etc. (response to 21)

Posted by Joel Aufrecht on 04/21/04 07:50 AM

I think that woody means three-year old versions of packages, and it rarely breaks. sid means one-month old versions of packages, and it often breaks. (in my experience).

Your timing is very good - check out the other post where Galileo University has released a debian package for .LRN:

http://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=177317

25: Re: Debian stable or testing? apt-get or yum? etc. (response to 22)

Posted by Roberto Mello on 04/22/04 06:37 PM

Woody NEVER breaks. I've never, ever, seen a Debian stable system break for anything related to the distribution.

I run Debian unstable on three different machines (one of them is a server) and only had one breakage in a desktop machine in the last year. The breakage was with GNOME, and was easy to solve.

In the one server I moved to unstable, we were running Woody + backports, but it became too painful. For a while we had a chroot with unstable, just so we could have some sid packages. So we (the group handling the machine) just bit the bullet and went to "careful unstable", meaning we watch the mailing lists and are careful before doing an upgrade.

-Roberto

26: Re: Debian stable or testing? apt-get or yum? etc. (response to 21)

Posted by Roberto Mello on 04/22/04 06:49 PM

Debian has four branches: Stable, testing, unstable and experimental.

Woody is the current release of the stable branch. It is very very stable, tested on all the 11 architectures Debian supports. There are policies in place that make sure that only certain updates make it into revisions of the stable distribution (such as security updates, critical bug fixes, etc.)

I think Woody is up to r3 now (third revision). A new version of a certain application package does not just make it into new revisions, unless it fixes some critical bug. This is because a new version may also introduce incompatibilities with other packages that could cause a ripple effect of not-well-tested updates.

Testing is what will become the next stable distribution once it's released. Currently it's called "Sarge" (all releases are after Toy Story characters for historical purposes). Sarge has a completely new installer and other things. Once Sarge has gone through severe tests on all architectures Debian supports, and all "release-critical" bugs have been resolved, it will be released as stable.

Unstable ("sid", the evil boy who tied Buzz Lightyear to a rocket) is where new packages (or new versions) are uploaded to. Once they've been tested, they make it to the testing distribution. Sometimes things break in sid, but not often. Usually they're fixed in a couple hours.

Experimental is like the wild west. A place for the strong of heart. Sort of another dimension. But it's kinda cool.

So basically, if you have a desktop machine, then you probably want to stick with unstable. If you have a server, you want stable. If you're a Debian developer, you want unstable (and hopefully you have a stable machine around so you can backport packages) and testing.

I've done some Debian installs through gnoppix and Morphix as well (knoppix-based distributions, which in turn is based on Debian). These live-cd distributions do the hardware detection and much of desktop configuration (e.g. X) for you. Morphix is modular and there are several flavors available. Knoppix/gnoppix is not modular, an the installer is less flexible (i.e. it wants a strict pre-defined partitioning).

So if you want a quick desktop machine, I'd say go with Morphix.

Hope that clears things up.

-Roberto