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Jessie Freeze Policy

release.debian.org

91 pointsmike-cardwell27 comments

If you use the stable Debian release now it's time to start testing the transition. Make sure to get bugs that aren't discovered yet or vital to your operation reported or fixed.

Don't complain if something in Jessie that's important to you breaks, help now to make sure it won't.

Could you elaborate?

I'm on Wheezy right now on my Ultrabook (using just a couple of backports, but almost exclusively Wheezy at the moment).

Are you saying that Wheezy users should migrate to Jessie to start finding bugs? Part of the reason I use Wheezy on this computer is because I know it's rock-solid and everything "just works". If I had another computer running Debian I would run Jessie or sid on it, but to be honest, I need to make sure that I have one computer that I can depend on reliably (which is why I use Debian stable to begin with).

If you're using Debian in a business environment, try upgrading a copy of your staging environment to Jessie to see what problems you encounter, so that they can be fixed before release.

If you're using it on your desktop or home servers, you could also upgrade in order to contribute testing to the project, but only if you're prepared for some things to potentially break.

I'm using jessie on my laptop and i am wondering what to do for the release switch. Should i change to "testing" now or stay on jessie, which becomes stable, and switch to the next testing later?

That's really up to you. If you need your laptop to function, it's probably a good idea to stay on the newly released Jessie for a few weeks or months. After a release developers usually push major upgrades into the reposistories. That tends to break stuff.

I stay with the toy story named releases. That way I never get a surprise upgrade when the meaning of "testing" changes. You almost never want that, since when the name changes it is the early days of testing.

Later when I need something from the next release, I'll upgrade to its name.

Sid is a toy story character :P

That's fine, because sid is basically always the firehose of new packages. sid is always equivalent to unstable, so neither matters.

But "testing" is dynamic. Before the release it's lenny, after the release it'll surprise-upgrade itself to whatever sid was at the branching point.

also https://wiki.debian.org/DebianUnstable#Which_Toy_Story_chara...

Aren't they all Toy Story named releases?

I think he means that he has 'jessie' listed in sources.list, rather than 'testing'. The latter will refer to a different version when jessie becomes stable, and again when the next one becomes stable.

Ohh, the naming suddenly makes more sense... though I'm entirely unfamiliar with Toy Story,

Is there any way to tell (from the names) which are newer versions of Debian?

Personally, give me version numbers any day ;)

Take a look at /etc/os-release, or /etc/debian_version for version numbers.

Otherwise you'll need to look at Wikipedia for the list. Recently the releases have been: etch, lenny, squeeze, wheezy, and now jessie.

Or simply consult the Debian website https://www.debian.org/releases/

No easy way exists like in Ubuntus' steady progress of alliteration through the alphabet.

https://www.debian.org/releases/ lists the releases by codename and version number all the way back to 2.0/hamm.

At least you don't use Toy Story for your work computer naming scheme like my company.

After 4 months of hard work and joining both the Debian JavaScript Packaging team and the Debian Multimedia Packaging team, I have managed to get Groove Basin [1] accepted into Jessie [2], just in time for the freeze!

[1]: https://github.com/andrewrk/groovebasin

[2]: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.debian.devel.changes....

Neat project, I think I'll take a look at running it on the new CubieTruck in my basement.

Congrats! Looking forward to trying it.

Awesome looking music player. I will certainly be trying out your project---and mille mercis for putting in the effort of getting it into Debian Jessie. That is really going above and beyond.

I've croutonized two of my chromebooks with debian: one jessie, the other one sid - simply to access latest packages.

Would "sid" now become the testing?

Sid is always unstable. They'll create a new branch for Testing.

And sid is always unstable because in Toy Story, Sid was the kid who mangled and tortured all his toys.

sid == trunk

sid is then branched into a new codename which moves through the testing phase and then stable.

"Testing" and "stable" are rolling names which always points to the branch currently in the testing or stable phase, respectively.

(Well, simplified. There's also the experimental branch, but that's not something you can run. Then there's oldstable which is the phase after stable.)

It looks like OpenJDK 8 won't make it in time. Debian Stable won't have Java 8 in the repos for a while...

Saw Jessie running on Asus touch enabled laptop. New GNOME looks promising. There were some minor bugs.

is this the release where systemd expands its control to debian ?

No. Already discussed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8487142

Reply on news.ycombinator.com