Dear friends, Hope you or some of you will like this article. any correction/criticism is always welcome.
******************************************************************************************* The symlinks (See: ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/) define the debian branches on the main mirror collections. old stable -> potato (Debian 2.2) stable -> woody (Debian 3.0) testing -> sarge unstable -> sid The names of branches have always been taken from character names in the movie "Toy Story" (because then-Debian Project Leader Bruce Perens worked at Pixar Animation Studios, at the time this practice was established). At any given time, there has always been a stable branch and an unstable one. When the unstable branch was deemed sufficiently well tested, the symlinks get relinked: E.g., at some point in the future, the "stable" symlink will get moved from woody to sarge. By convention, the unstable branch is always called Sid, the name of the sadistic neighbour child in the film who delighted in breaking toys. For the last few years, there has also been a "testing" branch, made possible by an improvement in how the mirror sites are organised (look up "package pools", if you're interested in details) and some automated testing scripts that examine newly uploaded packages from the 1000+ official Debian package maintainers, verifying that they build from source without error and meet certain other quality tests. Packages that pass those automated tests auto-appear in "testing" as well as "unstable". Therefore, the "testing" branch is almost as cutting-edge as "unstable", but less prone to sudden problems from maintainer errors or new and exciting bugs from the upstream sources. Almost all the time, you can just keep your Debian-testing system a couple of safe steps back from the bleeding edge but _very_ current by just doing a weekly "apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade" to resynchronise against currently available versions of all installed packages. This approach works best if you have at least 33.6 kbps modem access to the Internet, a point we'll return to, below. Please note that the above purpose of the Debian-testing branch is to test packages for the next Debian-stable release. The fact that it's also a dandy way of running a cutting-edge Debian system (generally) without problems is an incidental side-effect, and the Debian maintainers won't listen if you complain that (e.g.) the introduction of glibc 2.3.1 into Debian-testing broke Debian-testing's version of PHP4. The Debian Project actually set themselves a more-difficult task than Mandrakesoft do: Each Debian branch is carefully kept coherent so that it can be incrementally updated to current package versions for that branch, at any time. There's never any need to reinstall Debian to get the newest "release": By the time a new "release" comes out, your apt-get maintenance of your system has already been upgraded by small steps at a time _past_ those versions. (Debian CD-ROM sets are best seen as merely a convenience for getting a system going, so you can sync to current package versions using apt-get.) In other words, with Linux-Mandrake 9.1, Mandrakesoft have been able to devote quality-control efforts on a _single_ set of packages, which will consequently be very cutting edge, but only for a short time following the distribution release. By contrast, the Debian-testing and Debian-unstable[1] branches get new package releases continually: They are (respectively) just short of and at the cutting edge all the time, thanks to apt-get, the firmly applied Debian Policy that regulates how packages must be constructed and interact with other software, and the Internet package mirror collections. It may be that Debian-testing (currently "sarge") would meet your needs. You might try it, using one of the many Debian-compatible installers such as Knoppix, Libranet, the Progeny Graphical Installer CD, or Xandros Desktop OS. Here are some hints on using the Knoppix CD for that purpose: http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/linux-info/debian-knoppix Debian-unstable and Debian-testing have recently gone through a difficult transition caused by the GNU Project's release of glibc 2.3.1, which treats some gcc symbols differently and accordingly required update of some number of other packages, such as PHP4. (Debian-testing systems that use PHP4 currently need to manually install the "unstable" PHP4 package, to fix that package.) If there are packages you want that aren't provided prepackaged for your choice of Debian branch, you can often apt-get them from one of many "unofficial apt repositories". See: http://www.apt-get.org/ With a 33.6 kbps PPP connection and a modicum of patience, it's still quite feasible to maintain Debian-testing via apt-get over the Internet. Alternatively, you can batch download packages unattended, over slow Internet connections, apt-get update && \ apt-get -y --download-only dist-upgrade && \ apt-get autoclean That updates the available-packages lists, retrieves into /var/lib/dpkg/archive but doesn't install any new packages, and removes those no longer essential. You later, at your convenience, do a manual "apt-get dist-upgrade" to install the pre-fetched packages with human supervision. Please remember that *mixing* stable and testing tends to result is a neither-fish-nor-fowl system that is not as stable as either of those branches, being an uneasy mixture. Ditto for mixed stable/unstable systems. On the other hand, pulling down "unstable" packages as needed onto a Debian-testing system tends to work well, because the (figurative) distance between those branches is small. Please see the section Tips collection, http://linuxmafia.com/debian/tips . [1] Per requirements of Debian Policy, which requires that Debian-stable be kept maximally stable, package revisions are introduced into that branch only for crucial bug fixes and security fixes, and are usually backported to the most-stable version of the package. ****************************************************************************************************** Joydeep Bakshi, Dept. of Computer Sc. Gujrati College, Kolkata -- To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body "unsubscribe ilug-cal" and an empty subject line. FAQ: http://www.ilug-cal.org/node.php?id=3
