Rob Bradford wrote: > Any ideas for structure/content would be much appreciated.
Looks like you're doing fine on structure. What's new in the installation system: - debootstrap downloads and installs the base system from scratch now; most installs won't need to fool with the base tarball, or with a ton of floppies. - The task system has been revamped. The selection of tasks gone over and tightened up. It is now much easier to install only part of a task, rather than the whole thing. - Debconf is now the main interface users interact with during installation and configuration of packages (potato's release notes promised this would be so, and while there are still some holdouts, nearly all interaction is done via debconf now). - I suspect that the overall installed size of the base system (and thus one of Debian's minimum system requirements) may have gone *down* from potato, due to various space-reduction changes (especially the locales change). If so, it'd be really cool to mention that. TODO: compare unpacked size of potato's base.tgz with the chroot debootstrap builds. What's new in the distribution: - apt now has support for "pinning", which can be used to track stable, while easily pulling selected updated packages from unstable or testing. - Build dependancies have been added to a great deal of the distribution. These aid in compiling packages from source, letting you make sure everything necessary is installed before starting the compile. "apt-get build-dep" can be used to automatically install the necessary packages. - A fancy Gnome frontend has been added to debconf, and a flexible backend database as well. - Numerous frontends for apt have been in development throughout woody's development cycle, and many of them are nearing a quite usable state. - A major new release of X, version 4.0, is included, with more support for more hardware, better hardware autodetection, etc. - This is the first version of Debian to include a full-featured, free, web browser (mozilla). (I think this is really significant, since this may be the first release where most of our users don't go install netscape from non-free to get a decent browser.) - (The normal bragging about new versions of stuff, added packages and cd's and so on.) Oh, one structural note: It might be nice if some of these items were hyperlinks to somewhere that provided more information. So you could click on "pinning" to see the (hypothetical) apt pinning HOWTO or whatever. -- see shy jo
