3 ms·

Why is there such a big difference in the number of packages in stable and unstable? I always thought that stable was mostly just a snapshot of the testing bran

by ufo 7y ago

Why is there such a big difference in the number of packages in stable and unstable? I always thought that stable was mostly just a snapshot of the testing branch, and that everything in unstable would make into testing before the freeze period.

dredmorbius 7y ago
First, don't take my counts as gospel. .... lessee ... OK, the Debian 10 ("buster") release notes give "over 59,000 other packages" (in addition to a dozen or so listed), so it's about 10k that didn't make the stable release. https://www.debian.org/News/2019/20190706 https://www.debian.org/News/2019/20190706 Only software with no release-critical bugs is included in the release, and with 70k+ packages in total, it's not surprising that some (mostly more obscure / unmaintained / or recently developed, I'd suspect) don't make the release cut. Debian also makes a practice of splitting out source packages ("over 29,000") into release packages, along arbitrary divisions such as: core vs. additional / support packages, base and dev, debug (unstripped and debugging compiliation options left in), documentation, and increasingly, various language support. So a single upstream could conceivably result in numerous Debian releases. Development tools are especially prone to this, see Python, Perl, R, etc., as examples. This allows for modularlity and precision in package selection, smaller installations, and choices in performance vs. diagnostics (debug) options. Pared-down systems can be configured without documentation packages, a fat desktop can be configured with full docs and support. Incidentally, the integrated support and DWWW package (Debian-WWW project) make your system effectively self-documenting via a local webserver, which can be extremely helpful. Similarly, each installed package creates an entry in /usr/share/doc/<packagename>, without the idiotic version number Red Hat adds (frustrating the ability to link directly to package docs without knowing the specific version number). It's even possible to reconstruct the package set of a corrupted Debian system from that list: http://qref.sourceforge.net/Debian/reference/ch-package.en.html#s-recover-status http://qref.sourceforge.net/Debian/reference/ch-package.en.h... Public examples used to be easier to find, this one turns up searching "powered by dwww version": https://lists.ci.juneau.ak.us/dwww/ https://lists.ci.juneau.ak.us/dwww/

by ufo 7y ago

dredmorbius 7y ago

First, don't take my counts as gospel. .... lessee ... OK, the Debian 10 ("buster") release notes give "over 59,000 other packages" (in addition to a dozen or so listed), so it's about 10k that didn't make the stable release. https://www.debian.org/News/2019/20190706 https://www.debian.org/News/2019/20190706 Only software with no release-critical bugs is included in the release, and with 70k+ packages in total, it's not surprising that some (mostly more obscure / unmaintained / or recently developed, I'd suspect) don't make the release cut. Debian also makes a practice of splitting out source packages ("over 29,000") into release packages, along arbitrary divisions such as: core vs. additional / support packages, base and dev, debug (unstripped and debugging compiliation options left in), documentation, and increasingly, various language support. So a single upstream could conceivably result in numerous Debian releases. Development tools are especially prone to this, see Python, Perl, R, etc., as examples. This allows for modularlity and precision in package selection, smaller installations, and choices in performance vs. diagnostics (debug) options. Pared-down systems can be configured without documentation packages, a fat desktop can be configured with full docs and support. Incidentally, the integrated support and DWWW package (Debian-WWW project) make your system effectively self-documenting via a local webserver, which can be extremely helpful. Similarly, each installed package creates an entry in /usr/share/doc/<packagename>, without the idiotic version number Red Hat adds (frustrating the ability to link directly to package docs without knowing the specific version number). It's even possible to reconstruct the package set of a corrupted Debian system from that list: http://qref.sourceforge.net/Debian/reference/ch-package.en.html#s-recover-status http://qref.sourceforge.net/Debian/reference/ch-package.en.h... Public examples used to be easier to find, this one turns up searching "powered by dwww version": https://lists.ci.juneau.ak.us/dwww/ https://lists.ci.juneau.ak.us/dwww/