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biggest problem is long release cycles = out-of-date kernel, X11biggest problem is long release cycles = out-of-date kernel, X11Posted Aug 11, 2004 3:33 UTC (Wed) by stevenj (guest, #421)Parent article: Review: Debian-Installer Release Candidate 1 (linux.com) I've installed Debian a number of times, and the biggest problem is not the installer, but rather the fact that Debian's long release cycles mean that (except immediately after release) the installer relies on an old kernel lacking the latest drivers. X11 is also quickly out of date too and you often need to upgrade to recognize recent cards — this is somewhat less of a problem since you can upgrade to (Yes, it's possible to load additional kernel modules off a floppy during the install process, but this is fairly hairy for non-experts.) They really need to update the installer kernel periodically, or better yet have a shorter release cycle for a small core including the kernel and X11.
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biggest problem is long release cycles = out-of-date kernel, X11 Posted Aug 11, 2004 7:19 UTC (Wed) by lolando (subscriber, #7139) [Link] I believe the current rc1 is using kernel 2.4.26 on most arches, which was the latest released kernel available when the rc1 images were built. They may still decide to go for 2.4.27 before final.
As for X11... I'm not convinced the version used is really old either.
And the "split release" (core/rest) has been discussed numerous times with no clear advantages being found.
biggest problem is long release cycles = out-of-date kernel, X11 Posted Aug 11, 2004 7:33 UTC (Wed) by lolando (subscriber, #7139) [Link] Update about the kernel: the *default* kernel is 2.4.26, but as far as I know there's always the option of installing using 2.6.7, which was also the latest 2.6.* kernel released at the time of rc1.
biggest problem is long release cycles = out-of-date kernel, X11 Posted Aug 11, 2004 9:34 UTC (Wed) by climent (subscriber, #7232) [Link] And the "split release" (core/rest) has been discussed numerous times with no clear advantages being found.Huh? No clear advantages being found? I thought after having 9000+ binary packages for Sarge we had already decided to go for a Core+Components release for Sarge+1, since is humanly impossible to get a decent release with so many packages.
biggest problem is long release cycles = out-of-date kernel, X11 Posted Aug 11, 2004 10:50 UTC (Wed) by broonie (subscriber, #7078) [Link] IIRC the main problem is that the stuff you want to include in the core (kernel, glibc, X, GNOME, KDE, GCC, whatever) is the stuff that has problems: with most of the rest of the packages you can relatively easily just drop it from the release if it's buggy.
biggest problem is long release cycles = out-of-date kernel, X11 Posted Aug 11, 2004 15:41 UTC (Wed) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link] The problem is that they will get out-of-date very, very quickly. It needs some process whereby the installer's kernel and drivers get frequent updates in between releases.
biggest problem is long release cycles = out-of-date kernel, X11 Posted Aug 12, 2004 0:41 UTC (Thu) by BrucePerens (subscriber, #2510) [Link] The new installer comes in a 2.6 version and a 2.4 version. Nothing seems to break. Debian packages both 2.4 and 2.6 .Bruce
biggest problem is long release cycles = out-of-date kernel, X11 Posted Aug 12, 2004 5:22 UTC (Thu) by stevenj (guest, #421) [Link] Bruce you are completely missing my point (just like another respondent above, sigh).Yes, immediately after a Debian release, the kernel and X are up-to-date — I'm not complaining about any current problems with Sarge. The problem is that they quickly will be out of date, just as Woody's installer is out of date now ... Debian's long release cycles essentially guarantee that any installer will use obsolete versions for a majority of its lifetime. So, improvements to the installer UI are nice, but they don't address what, for me, has been the major hassle in installing Debian — to address that, Debian needs to have a shorter release cycle for the installer kernel and X. (Or at least, have supplementary kernel modules and video drivers backported to stable periodically.)
biggest problem is long release cycles = out-of-date kernel, X11 Posted Aug 12, 2004 8:16 UTC (Thu) by lacostej (subscriber, #2760) [Link] Except that Debian stable is targetted at servers. Yo don't need a new X nor a new kernel on those machines, most of the time.
Maybe the backports site takes care of this for you, but I am not 100% sure.
biggest problem is long release cycles = out-of-date kernel, X11 Posted Aug 12, 2004 11:53 UTC (Thu) by jhs (subscriber, #12429) [Link] I agree with stevenj on this one. New server hardware does come out periodically, for example network and disk controllers (I'm thinking about new SCSI and RAID cards). Installing woody on a system with such new hardware is not fun.
biggest problem is long release cycles = out-of-date kernel, X11 Posted Aug 12, 2004 15:36 UTC (Thu) by jeld (guest, #22397) [Link] Debian web site, clearly states, that security patches are not issued foreither unstable or testing, and that security is not a primary concern for these branches due to their experimental nature. http://www.debian.org/security/faq.en-gb.html#testing I would not want my desktop system to have a few gaping security holes just because I installed Debian testing/unstable system. On the other hand I do not want to run KDE 2.2.2 or Gnome 1.4.1 o(versions taken from current stable branch) just to have a stable secure system. The sarge release will help this issue for a couple of months (if that), but KDE 3.3 is right around the corner, GNOME 2.8 is coming in huge strides, and once these and other packages are released the Debian stable will be back to being a horrible dinosaur. Some people have suggested running stable with some packages from testing/unstable using apt pinning. Unfortunately, as soon as testing/unstable changes version of some major piece of software such as glibc everything starts to depend on it. So, trying to install latest version of say abiword will pull latest GNOME, GTK+, XFree, glibc, etc. Effectively your system will become a testing/unstable with a few outdated packages. The only true remedy (IMHO) for the situation, would be for the security team to become responsible for testing branch. This might mean that some stuff will take longer to get from unstable to testing, but at least testing will have most latest versions of stuff and be binary compatible with latest and greatest.
biggest problem is long release cycles = out-of-date kernel, X11 Posted Aug 19, 2004 8:50 UTC (Thu) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link] Making the security team keep up-to-date with testing won't help a thing.Certainly maintainers of packages in unstable ought to be a little more security-aware than they are (at the very least, they should be alerted to get an upstream fix by the very fact that the stable version has had a security update) but the Security team itself should not be obliged to track the latest-and-greatest of everything; their job is to keep production systems secure. By-and-large unstable gets security fixes shortly after the upstream fix to the latest version. Remember than *Debian* unstable/testing is actually a collection of upstream maintainers' latest *stable* packages. The only real solution is to shorten the gap between *stable* releases of Debian. Another stable release in one year instead of three wouldn't hurt anyone. The pain of upgrading from a three-year-old stable to a current one is about to be inflicted on thousands of users; as Debian developers have to go through all that *anyway*, they may as well go through a minor dose of release-agony once a year than heaps every three or four years. The security team will then not have to worry about back-porting at all! I think this is the plan anyway.
biggest problem is long release cycles = out-of-date kernel, X11 Posted Aug 17, 2004 14:39 UTC (Tue) by hazelsct (subscriber, #3659) [Link] WRT X, you're right, out-of-date X does cause problems for newer hardware.
WRT kernels, my experience with both potato and woody was that -proposed-updates had new kernels very quickly; I don't see why this would change with sarge. Just add one extra line to /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian stable-proposed-updates main contrib non-free
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