Debian adds security support for testing [LWN.net]

Debian adds security support for testing

Posted Sep 9, 2005 19:57 UTC (Fri) by NightMonkey (subscriber, #23051)
In reply to: Debian adds security support for testing by peace
Parent article: Debian adds security support for testing

This will make Debian a very interesting choice for the desktop as being able to run fairly bleeding edge apps, with security updates, is something I have not seen in any other distribution.

Except Gentoo, perhaps? Or maybe you didn't see that.

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Debian adds security support for testing

Posted Sep 9, 2005 20:30 UTC (Fri) by peace (guest, #10016) [Link]

I thought of Gentoo as I wrote that but wasn't aware that they had security updates for testing, at least not as an official policy. Obviously if a package maintainer wants to keep their testing tree updated with security patches they can. The last I saw Gentoo was still working out the security patch system for the stable tree, but that was awhile ago now. Anyway, as usual, Gentoo also does X.

Kind Regards

Debian adds security support for testing

Posted Sep 11, 2005 3:06 UTC (Sun) by ferringb (subscriber, #20752) [Link]

Gentoo doesn't have 'testing' keywords; strictly stable/unstable; that said, we already have security teams for all arches, plus usual glsa postings (with tools for upgrading just the pkgs that are affected).
(Thoroughly offtopic, just correcting misview) :)

Debian adds security support for testing

Posted Sep 11, 2005 15:50 UTC (Sun) by peace (guest, #10016) [Link]

Hmmm, what are the ~x86 and -x86 keywords for if not testing /and/ unstable?

Good to know there is a dedicated security effort.

One thing about Gentoo, you sure can't say anything about it without being corrected! :) (this is a good thing, it's got a very active and helpful community. Even though it's hard to peg down it's ever evolving features.)

Kind Regards

Debian adds security support for testing

Posted Sep 12, 2005 12:59 UTC (Mon) by farnz (guest, #17727) [Link]

Gentoo has three keywords per architecture:

Plain arch (e.g. "x86"). This is used for software believed to be stable on that architecture.
~arch (e.g. "~x86"). This is used for software that needs testing on that architecture (but should work).
-arch (e.g. "-x86"). This is used for software that is known not to work on that architecture (such as binary-only software, or things like arcboot which depend on a specific architecture).

In addition, you've got masked packages (which are in the tree if you want to use them and give feedback, but which are expected to break - think GNOME and KDE alphas, for example), and unkeyworded packages (which are not known to work or fail on that architecture).