Debian Sarge Declared Stable

Despite only a minor increment in the version number (from 3.0 to 3.1), sarge represents a substantial improvement incorporating many new technologies and packages that have been provided by their respective upstream maintainers over the past three years. In terms of included packages, sarge is on a conservative side of things since most packages were in a state of "semi-freeze" several months prior to the release. The default kernel is 2.4.27 (an optional 2.6.8 kernel is also available in the initial GRUB boot menu after installation), the X window system is provided by XFree86 4.3.0, GNOME is at 2.8 and KDE at 3.3.2. While all of these packages are somewhat behind the current stable releases, sarge is still a major upgrade from woody. Just remember that if you had installed the then stable version of Debian just two weeks ago, your system would be running kernel 2.2.20 and GNOME 1.4!

Debian 3.1 has broken a number of interesting records. With a total of 16,792 individual DEB packages, it is, without a doubt, the largest Linux distribution release ever produced. Its source code comes on no fewer than fifteen 650 MB compact discs. If one were to download all CD images for all 11 supported architectures, plus the images for the unofficial AMD64 port, and source code, this would amount to a total of 177 compact discs, or over 105 GB of data! No wonder it took almost three years to put it all together! Another interesting tidbit: the official release announcement was simultaneously published in 18 different languages, while the comprehensive 33-page release notes are available in 15 different languages. The installation of Debian can now be accomplished in one of the 43 available languages, including some obscure ones, such as Galician or Welsh. All this clearly demonstrates that a well-organized community of volunteer developers and contributors can often accomplish more than a large commercial company employing dozens of well-paid software engineers!

Besides package upgrades, probably the most noticeable improvement in sarge is the brand new Debian Installer. Gone are the days when one had to navigate the unintuitive interface of "dselect" to select packages to install. Instead, the installer makes some intelligent partitioning and package selection guesses based on a preferred "scheme" as chosen by the user. As an example, selecting "workstation" as the preferred scheme, the installer would create separate partitions for /usr, /var, /tmp and /home, then install GNOME, KDE and many development packages. On the other hand, choosing "desktop" as the preferred scheme would result in a root partition with only one separate partition for /home, plus GNOME and KDE, and without the development packages. The available file systems include ext3, JFS, ReiserFS and XFS, while GRUB has replaced LILO as the default boot loader. The new installer also comes with a hardware auto-detection module enabled by default, although first reports indicate that these are not as powerful and reliable as the ones found in most other major distributions.

Sarge supports 11 processor architectures, which is the same as woody. One interesting omission is the increasingly popular AMD64 platform, which has been in development for some time, but has not been included in the main Debian archive due to disk space limitations. Nevertheless, the AMD64 edition of Debian sarge was released as an "unofficial" port, complete with the full package tree, CD and DVD images, as well as support provided by the Debian Security Team throughout the lifetime of sarge. Despite its "unofficial" status, the AMD64 port has been able to keep pace with the main Debian archive and the debian-amd64 mailing list is now the second most active among the ports, only slightly behind the debian-powerpc list.

Not everything went well with the release. An oversight while building the sarge ISO images caused that the sources.list entry for security updates pointed to the "testing" instead of the "stable" branch. This easily rectifiable problem only affected users installing from full CD or DVD images, which meant that these had to be rebuilt under a new version number - 3.1r0a. However, there was also a much more serious problem - a complete breakdown of the sarge security update infrastructure right after the release: "So, it looks like we'll be without security updates for quite a while," reported Martin Schultze in his web blog.

Now that sarge is out of the bag, what's next? Naturally, the development continues unabated in the unstable and testing branches, the latter of which has now been renamed to "etch". Etch will eventually become the new stable release. In the meanwhile, the unstable branch has already received a large number of new package upgrades from the experimental branch, including upgrades to some of the important base packages, such as Perl. GNOME 2.10 has also been moved to unstable. Next, we will slowly start seeing major upgrades to glibc and GCC 4.x, as well as a big migration to apt 0.6 with its newly added support for cryptographic verification of the origin of packages. XFree86 will be replaced with X.Org and KDE should also be updated to 3.4.x in the not too distant future.