[lug] X/Gnome/Sawmill problem

[Nate Duehr]

On Thu, Apr 26, 2001 at 09:12:56AM -0600, Glenn Murray wrote:
> That's good news (what is "sid", though?).  At CLUE I heard that
> Debian KDE had made it to stable but had been pushed back into
> "testing" after major tests had failed.

There's currently three releases of Debian -- things changed a little
this year to add one to the mix.

stable: released version - security patches available at
security.debian.org -- I run this on the server at home.

testing: packages that have been in unstable for a certain period of
time without critical or major bugs filed against them.  some teething
pains on this one, the scripts about the bugs can be pretty strict, and
they can pull stuff out today that you downloaded from testing's
directory yesterday if a major bug gets filed against it.  Basially I
don't like "testing", but it *is* going to make deciding what goes into
each release a lot easier for the folks who make those decisions, from
what I can tell. -- I ran this on a laptop and completely got hosed up
by something falling out of testing and breaking all my dependencies.  I
don't really recommend it right now, but it'll get better as the folks
who came up with it are still getting it right.  It's SUPPOSED to be a
"more stable version of unstable"... whatever that means.

unstable: changes daily.  stuff breaks.  only run if you can fix stuff
yourself or you're willing to upgrade a machine you don't care about and
see if it's in a "semi-stable" state that day and then track the mailing
lists and IRC to see if any major breakage happens that you don't want
to do an "update" that day... developer version, basically, but
sometimes has the "latest and greatest" in it if you can live with the
weirdness.  I run this on the desktop machine at home.

All Debian releases have a codename (just like RedHat's "Guinness" and
"Cartman") all named after Toy Story characters.  

Back to where I remember are:

bo
hamm
slink
potato - current "stable"
woody - current "testing"
sid - current "unstable"

The codenames help the mirrors in that they used to change the symlinks
and leave the codenames alone.  However some mirroring software is
really dumb and couldn't do this without still redownloading everything
and bandwidth is at a premium for a 100% non-profit organization like
Debian, so recently another major switch was to the "package pools"
format on the mirrors.  

All distros now pull from an alphabetized "pool" directory with stable,
testing, and unstable files mixed together.  You have to look in
Packages.gz in the release name directory for your file if you're going
after "stable" release stuff, because if you just grab the latest
version you may be getting "unstable" or "testing" stuff.

Of course, depending on compiler changes, language, and other stuff,
many times "unstable" packages really aren't at all and you can download
the source package and recompile it on "stable" without any problems at
all.  Just depends on what's changed.  GCC being in a wild state of flux
this year, and the 2.2 to 2.4 kernel changes have made back-compiling a
challenge both for the i386 crowd and for the numerous other
architectures this year.  The IA64 port is off to a GREAT start though,
and it's looking great.  Ethan Benson is killing himself on the PowerPC
stuff and the crew doing the new installer is struggling mightily with
supporting all architectures with a single installation program source
tree... whew!

So that's Debian releases in a nutshell.  Packages go through a rigorous
testing cycle right before release and if Release-Critical bugs are
found and reported as such to the Debian bug tracking system (or BTS as
it's known), those packages MUST be fixed or they cannot be released at
release time.  The BTS is open to all, and remains so by documented
policy.  ANYONE can turn in a bug about anything in Debian.  And it MUST
be addressed by the package maintainer.

> My whole point (and a lot of other desktop developer's, I presume) is
> to have the desktop be a transparent working environment.  I want to
> be thinking about my tasks, not where I'm running them.  When I was
> using Win98 I wouldn't often forget it because it would occasionally
> give me a blue-screen reminder.  Gnome is a little better than Win98,
> but markedly inferior, in terms of stability (in my experience) than
> Win2K.  Win2K has raised my expectations.

Never has been a Unix desktop I've been 100% happy with, but at least
there are choices.  Themes in Windows just don't cut it!  :-)

> I was impressed enough by Kurt Granroth's KDE plug at CLUE to give KDE
> a try, but "unstable" and "unofficial" are probably not going to give
> KDE a fair chance.  In the meantime I'll just make do with Gnome.

Numerous distros have excellent KDE support besides Debian.  Debian's
behind on KDE stuff because of old issues with the KDE licensing that QT
would not address, and Debian would not allow KDE into the "main"
archive until QT addressed their licensing problems.  There's literally
hundreds of postings to debian-devel archived at lists.debian.org if you
want to see the long drawn-out painful process it was to hash out the
issues and argue about the licensing.  Most other distributions ignored
it, but Debian's constitution WON'T ALLOW them to put anything into the
distro unless is passes FREE-as-in-FREEDOM open-source license
requirements.  Debian can run some non-free software with
Free-as-in-BEER usage licenses but closed Free-As-In-Freedom licensing,
and even has a section called "non-free" in the FTP archives, but
nothing in non-free ever goes on a CD-ROM image and non-free can be
turned off and not used right at initial installation on Debian if you
truly want to see where truly FREE software stands today.  KDE did not
meet the requirements for a long time.

> By the way, I heard that Havoc Pennington from Gnome didn't make it to
> CLUE due to an accident requiring a hand operation.  That sounds bad
> for a programmer; I've also heard that RMS had severe CTS---maybe that
> explains why he seems so cranky.  Any word on Havoc?

Ouch... my wrists hurt from typing this!  :-)  haha...

Again, if you want KDE on "potato", it *is* available, but you have to
download the .deb files from a source other than the main Debian sites,
as nothing gets "backported" and sometimes release cycles run over.
Woody is constantly slipping right now, as there are very few people who
PROGRAM Linux around anymore who are willing to do it for free as part
of a group working on the world's only 100% truly free software OS, by
order of their own Constitution and Policy documents.

-- 
Nate Duehr <nate at natetech.com>

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