6 ms·

Debian Squeeze Frozen

86 points by flojo 16y ago

kalessin 16y ago
Linux 2.6.32 will be quite outdated upon release, I hope they will make a squeeze 'n half like they did for Etch. Also, I hope python 2.6 will be enough for the Squeeze lifetime, as python 2.7 is stable now. Python 2.5 on Lenny (while 2.6 was already released) was problematic in term of lacking features.
- avar 16y ago
  They're also shipping Perl from the three year old 5.10 branch, instead of the 4 month old 5.12.
  - jolan 16y ago
    That's why the nickname for stable is stale.
    - Dunbar 16y ago
      Which could be construed as a synonym for hardened.
- catch23 16y ago
  There's always backports.org :-) I'm surprised how many debian users don't know about backports. The packages there are quite stable and is useful for the one or two things you need updated versions of.
  - jolan 16y ago
    and http://www.dotdeb.org/ http://www.dotdeb.org/ for php/mysql and http://debian.dc-uoit.net/debian-multimedia/ http://debian.dc-uoit.net/debian-multimedia/ for an ffmpeg that has modernish codecs
- hga 16y ago
  Which kernel was a bit tricky for squeeze (note that the below is based on old and perhaps out of date research): First of course they wanted to start with a stable enough one; I remember them passing over one possibility (.31???) because it wasn't very good in their and many other people's opinion. This will be the last version of Debian that supports a Xen DomU with a patched kernel vs. pv_ops; in theory pv_ops DomU will be sufficiently solid by the following release. Doing a solid merge of the code even with the SUSE foundation is non-trivial (Xen supplies it as patches to 2.6.18). I pay attention to this because some of what I do is with or on Xen and Debian lenny was the best DomU solution for me when I started.
  - Cabal 16y ago
    I think you meant forward-ported Dom0 patches. Lenny already supported DomU operation without modification.
    - hga 16y ago
      Yes, yes, I spazzed 0 -> U. Thanks for the correction.
lelele 16y ago
Do these announcements belong here? I mean, those interested in learning about new releases of Debian, Ubuntu or some other software can just subscribe to dedicated mailing lists.
- fhars 16y ago
  Yeah, especially since debian freezes come so often that the resulting deluge of announcements has a very spammy feeling to it.
  - lelele 16y ago
    Disclosure: Debian lover here. Do you think the world runs on Debian? What if everybody started making announcements about his/her Linux distribution of choice? And what about other major pieces of software? Since you got 15 upvotes so far, I guess that would be really appreciated.
    - mgunes 16y ago
      > What if everybody started making announcements about his/her Linux distribution of choice? My unscientific impression is that the distributions of choice among active HN users who follow up the development and progress of their distribution closely are largely limited to Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and CentOS. News of pretty much every milestone release of these distributions is submitted, usually upvoted, and seems to be appreciated, before falling off the front page in less than a day in the most extreme case (final releases). The disaster scenario of this being the case for 43985 different distributions seems outside the realm of possibility, thus there's not much cause for concern.
      - lelele 16y ago
        I'm a bit amazed that HNers have to know from here whenever there is some big news regarding their softwares of choice. I didn't mention just GNU/Linux distributions, though, but all major pieces of software (languages, frameworks, etc.). Of course, if there is something special about some news, we'd like to know. For instance, when Debian started building on FreeBSD kernel, well, that's news! Instead, recently Debian got frozen... so what? If you already follow the development of Debian, you'd already learned that from other sources, and reading it here wouldn't add any value. It's about keeping an high signal to noise ratio. Recently, I feel HN is becoming noisier. Maybe I just overreacted because that annoys me. Well, it seems I'm the only one who's annoyed by this "noise", however. Or I just picked the less offensive source. Thanks for listening.
avar 16y ago
There's also a version of this up on the Debian website: http://www.debian.org/News/2010/20100806 http://www.debian.org/News/2010/20100806 One very interesting thing about this release is the introduction of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. I've been running it in a VirtualBox, and while it has some bugs it's also a wonderful addition to Debian. They've just recently got the userspace ZFS tools working on a FreeBSD 8.1 kernel running a GNU userland and a GNU C library. We're heading for a brave new world where the kernel is just another package, not some immutable part of the whole system.
- Ixiaus 16y ago
  We're heading for a brave new world where the kernel is just another package, not some immutable part of the whole system. While I can agree with this on the grounds that diversity of choice is a Good Thing and will introduce innovation and cross pollination between the two camps (hence my comment about being happy that they are experimenting with it); I disagree with it because the solidity and strength of FreeBSD primarily comes from it being developed and offered as a cohesive whole (Kernel and userland). Lack of cohesion is one of my major gripes with the GNU/Linux "distribution" model; although, I will say that Debian seems to be making up for this with excellent progress!
  - avar 16y ago
    Sure, I mean that comment in the context of Debian. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD isn't going to be a replacement for FreeBSD any time soon for the people that prefer it. But it's an excellent alternative for Debian users who'd like to use ZFS and other FreeBSD features without throwing the rest of Debian out with the bathwater. This'll also be wonderful for the BSD's in terms of increasing the portability of packages in Debian that they might want to pick up.
    - Ixiaus 16y ago
      But it's an excellent alternative... That's the key reason I think it's a Good Thing; portability for FreeBSD was never a big issue because of Linux Binary Compatibility, though...
Ixiaus 16y ago
I'm glad to see that they are experimenting with mixing Debian userland and the FreeBSD kernel... 6.0 looks like a very promising release.
drv 16y ago
The claim that "This is the first time a Linux distribution has been extended to also allow use of a non-Linux kernel" is a little odd, given that Gentoo/FreeBSD has been around for several years: http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/bsd/fbsd/ http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/bsd/fbsd/ Admittedly, Gentoo's port uses the FreeBSD libc whereas Debian ported glibc, and the Gentoo port is not exactly ready for prime time, but claiming Debian did it first is a bit of a stretch.
- avar 16y ago
  Debian has also had Debian GNU/Hurd in unstable state for years. That Gentoo/FreeBSD page mentions that the port is "experimental" and "incomplete". So presumably they're talking about a non-Linux kernel as a first-class component in a stable release.
msy 16y ago
I feel like I've just witnessed a comet passing or a lunar eclipse.
bobf 16y ago
I've been using Squeeze in production systems for several months, as I needed a wide variety of bug fixes/features it provided over Lenny. It has been completely stable - glad to see Debian development moving forward.

86 points by flojo 16y ago

Debian Squeeze Frozen

Linux 2.6.32 will be quite outdated upon release, I hope they will make a squeeze 'n half like they did for Etch. Also, I hope python 2.6 will be enough for the Squeeze lifetime, as python 2.7 is stable now. Python 2.5 on Lenny (while 2.6 was already released) was problematic in term of lacking features.

avar 16y ago
They're also shipping Perl from the three year old 5.10 branch, instead of the 4 month old 5.12.
- jolan 16y ago
  That's why the nickname for stable is stale.
  - Dunbar 16y ago
    Which could be construed as a synonym for hardened.
catch23 16y ago
There's always backports.org :-) I'm surprised how many debian users don't know about backports. The packages there are quite stable and is useful for the one or two things you need updated versions of.
- jolan 16y ago
  and http://www.dotdeb.org/ http://www.dotdeb.org/ for php/mysql and http://debian.dc-uoit.net/debian-multimedia/ http://debian.dc-uoit.net/debian-multimedia/ for an ffmpeg that has modernish codecs
hga 16y ago
Which kernel was a bit tricky for squeeze (note that the below is based on old and perhaps out of date research): First of course they wanted to start with a stable enough one; I remember them passing over one possibility (.31???) because it wasn't very good in their and many other people's opinion. This will be the last version of Debian that supports a Xen DomU with a patched kernel vs. pv_ops; in theory pv_ops DomU will be sufficiently solid by the following release. Doing a solid merge of the code even with the SUSE foundation is non-trivial (Xen supplies it as patches to 2.6.18). I pay attention to this because some of what I do is with or on Xen and Debian lenny was the best DomU solution for me when I started.
- Cabal 16y ago
  I think you meant forward-ported Dom0 patches. Lenny already supported DomU operation without modification.
  - hga 16y ago
    Yes, yes, I spazzed 0 -> U. Thanks for the correction.

lelele 16y ago

Do these announcements belong here? I mean, those interested in learning about new releases of Debian, Ubuntu or some other software can just subscribe to dedicated mailing lists.

fhars 16y ago
Yeah, especially since debian freezes come so often that the resulting deluge of announcements has a very spammy feeling to it.
- lelele 16y ago
  Disclosure: Debian lover here. Do you think the world runs on Debian? What if everybody started making announcements about his/her Linux distribution of choice? And what about other major pieces of software? Since you got 15 upvotes so far, I guess that would be really appreciated.
  - mgunes 16y ago
    > What if everybody started making announcements about his/her Linux distribution of choice? My unscientific impression is that the distributions of choice among active HN users who follow up the development and progress of their distribution closely are largely limited to Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and CentOS. News of pretty much every milestone release of these distributions is submitted, usually upvoted, and seems to be appreciated, before falling off the front page in less than a day in the most extreme case (final releases). The disaster scenario of this being the case for 43985 different distributions seems outside the realm of possibility, thus there's not much cause for concern.
    - lelele 16y ago
      I'm a bit amazed that HNers have to know from here whenever there is some big news regarding their softwares of choice. I didn't mention just GNU/Linux distributions, though, but all major pieces of software (languages, frameworks, etc.). Of course, if there is something special about some news, we'd like to know. For instance, when Debian started building on FreeBSD kernel, well, that's news! Instead, recently Debian got frozen... so what? If you already follow the development of Debian, you'd already learned that from other sources, and reading it here wouldn't add any value. It's about keeping an high signal to noise ratio. Recently, I feel HN is becoming noisier. Maybe I just overreacted because that annoys me. Well, it seems I'm the only one who's annoyed by this "noise", however. Or I just picked the less offensive source. Thanks for listening.

avar 16y ago

There's also a version of this up on the Debian website: http://www.debian.org/News/2010/20100806 http://www.debian.org/News/2010/20100806 One very interesting thing about this release is the introduction of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. I've been running it in a VirtualBox, and while it has some bugs it's also a wonderful addition to Debian. They've just recently got the userspace ZFS tools working on a FreeBSD 8.1 kernel running a GNU userland and a GNU C library. We're heading for a brave new world where the kernel is just another package, not some immutable part of the whole system.

Ixiaus 16y ago
We're heading for a brave new world where the kernel is just another package, not some immutable part of the whole system. While I can agree with this on the grounds that diversity of choice is a Good Thing and will introduce innovation and cross pollination between the two camps (hence my comment about being happy that they are experimenting with it); I disagree with it because the solidity and strength of FreeBSD primarily comes from it being developed and offered as a cohesive whole (Kernel and userland). Lack of cohesion is one of my major gripes with the GNU/Linux "distribution" model; although, I will say that Debian seems to be making up for this with excellent progress!
- avar 16y ago
  Sure, I mean that comment in the context of Debian. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD isn't going to be a replacement for FreeBSD any time soon for the people that prefer it. But it's an excellent alternative for Debian users who'd like to use ZFS and other FreeBSD features without throwing the rest of Debian out with the bathwater. This'll also be wonderful for the BSD's in terms of increasing the portability of packages in Debian that they might want to pick up.
  - Ixiaus 16y ago
    But it's an excellent alternative... That's the key reason I think it's a Good Thing; portability for FreeBSD was never a big issue because of Linux Binary Compatibility, though...

Ixiaus 16y ago

I'm glad to see that they are experimenting with mixing Debian userland and the FreeBSD kernel... 6.0 looks like a very promising release.

drv 16y ago

The claim that "This is the first time a Linux distribution has been extended to also allow use of a non-Linux kernel" is a little odd, given that Gentoo/FreeBSD has been around for several years: http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/bsd/fbsd/ http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/bsd/fbsd/ Admittedly, Gentoo's port uses the FreeBSD libc whereas Debian ported glibc, and the Gentoo port is not exactly ready for prime time, but claiming Debian did it first is a bit of a stretch.

avar 16y ago
Debian has also had Debian GNU/Hurd in unstable state for years. That Gentoo/FreeBSD page mentions that the port is "experimental" and "incomplete". So presumably they're talking about a non-Linux kernel as a first-class component in a stable release.

msy 16y ago

I feel like I've just witnessed a comet passing or a lunar eclipse.

bobf 16y ago

I've been using Squeeze in production systems for several months, as I needed a wide variety of bug fixes/features it provided over Lenny. It has been completely stable - glad to see Debian development moving forward.