Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 Set for December

dolson writes sends in a heartening update straight from the Debian project's news page: "The Debian project confirms December 2006 as the date for the next release of its distribution which will be named Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 alias 'etch'. This will be the first official release to include the AMD64 architecture. The distribution will be released synchronously for 11 architectures in total. At this stage, the upcoming release will ship with Linux 2.6.17 as its default kernel. This kernel will be used across all architectures and on the installer. A later version may be selected during a review in October. New features of this release include the GNU Compiler Collection 4.1 as default compiler. X.Org will replace XFree86 as implementation of the X Window System X11. Secure APT will add extra security by easily supporting strong cryptography and digital signatures to validate downloaded packages."

process

[slack_prad]

I've heard a lot about Debian's testing process. Can anyone explain how it works .. and what makes it so stable?

Re:Welcome

[Anonymous Coward]

you do have the admit that when they finally do move they move all the way (they are talking about a 2.6.17+ kernel for example)

Re:Welcome

[Anonymous Coward]

Also current stable release of Gnome. However the next Gnome release is set around the same time. Debian project should push back their release until they can get the Gnome 2.16 in, otherwise they'll be having outdated software for a lot longer time. Which has been usually the case in the past. It would be only about days..

Why?

[Espectr0]

The world needs a stable distribution for servers. Seems Debian is risking its default model for stability in order to appear being updated often.

I wonder if Ubuntu has got something to do with it...

How many years passed between debian 3.0 and 3.1? The changes were big, and now in so much less time a whole number (4.0) gets released.

What are the differences besides using a recent kernel for the first time?

3.1 is the new 4.0

[XanC]

There were major changes for Sarge, aka 3.1. Somebody pointed out that it should be 4.0, and everyone agreed, but it was too late in the release cycle to change it. They figured as long as it was higher than 3.0 it didn't really matter.

Re:OK, but...

[KiloByte]

does it run... Oh, never mind.

Don't laugh so loud, grasshopper. This question is adequate.
And the answer is: yes. K*BSD arches are in good shape, but none of them are release candidates for Etch. Nexenta (OpenSolaris kernel) gathered so much bad karma because of Sun's CDDL's intentional incompatibilities with GPL causing problems that Nexenta isn't going to be an official arch anywhere soon. Debian/Hurd isn't that bad, but too bad, Hurd remains just a toy for now. And Debian/Minix stays at the level of talks for now. It's only Debian/win32 which died completely.
So yeah, Etch does run Linux, but most likely Alien/Lenny/??? (Etch+1) will have K*BSD variants.

Will this include biarch support?

[Anonymous Coward]

The last tim I checked, apt-get wouldn't support two architectures on the same install (i.e. 32 bit and 64 library paths). RPM does support this, which is why I ended up choosing Fedora at the time. Does debian 4.0 finally support this, or it still single architecture?

Newer GCC than Gentoo stable

[makomk]

Hmmm... so they're moving to GCC 4.1? Hmmph - Gentoo stable is still stuck on the 3.4 series, at least on x86 and most architectures (mind you, it is a source-based distro, and moving to a new GCC major version is a big thing). I thought Debian was supposed to be behind the times, and Gentoo was supposed to be bleeding-edge?

(Seriously, I run Gentoo unstable, but I've deliberately taken measures to avoid upgrading to GCC 4 - still not worth it IMO, at least until I can be sure most software will actually build successfully with it.)

Re:OK, but...

[david.given]

And Debian/Minix stays at the level of talks for now. It's only Debian/win32 which died completely.

Debian/Minix would be cool, but it'll probably have to wait until Minix gets a paging VM and support for the brk() syscall --- curreently there's no way for an application to increase its heap size once it's started, which rather screws over most normal Unix apps. (For example, in order to run a configure script, you have to have a copy of sh handy which has been configured with a huge heap.)

Debian/Win32 I mourn, though. That would have been amazingly useful. The only real competitor I know of is Cygwin, whose package management facilities are awful...

(Debian/BeOS ought to be pretty possible, at least in single-user mode; and Debian/Plan9 would... okay, probably not really work.)

Re:Preview Release

[GnuAge]

Did anybody but them care? No.

Ummm, you obviously didn't care or you would have realized that Maoists ARE Stalinists. MouseyDung and his acolytes never had a problem with ol' Uncle Joe, just with the Social Imperialists who rose to the leadership a few years after he died. The CCP still trots out [www.iisg.nl] a portrait of Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili on the side of the Great Hall Of The People on ceremonial occasions. Speaking of trots, it is probably the Trotskyites/ists that you are thinking of, not the Maoists feuding with Stalinists. As I said to a Sparticist buddy of mine "Sects, sects, sects, that's all you ever talk about."

Actually, the Stalinist iconography has always been a bit of an embarassment to Western Maoists. I remember a Maoist bookstore in Berkeley in the seventies (now a Fish'N'Chips shop, I believe) where if you bought four portraits of the great socialist leaders (Marx, Engels, Lenin & Mao, presumably) they'd throw in a fifth poster of the Late, Great Man Of Steel for free (a 50 cent value!) A bargain at half the price.