Parallel release streams - Debian and Squeak scheme

Jimmie Houchin jhouchin at texoma.net
Mon Mar 17 16:12:46 UTC 2003


goran.hultgren at bluefish.se wrote:
> Hannes Hirzel <hannes.hirzel.squeaklist at bluewin.ch> wrote:
> [SNIP description of Debian's pipeline]
[snip]

> Well, first of all - stable doesn't go through a alpha-beta-gamma-final
> cycle at all.
> It just sits there quietly, perhaps gets a few bugfixes but that's it.
> And then BAM, it is replaced with a complete new version (when testing
> is declared as the new stable) over night.
> 
> Testing does indeed go through the cycle - just like we do in Squeak.
> But unstable has no such cycle - as Jimmie said its always in
> development. If I understand this correctly that is.

Yes, a perpetually moving target.

> The main difference compared to Squeak is that we have typically lacked
> "unstable". And of course, we haven't used packages and releases of
> those either.
> 
> Another difference is that in Debian - which is package centric - I can
> actually run stable and then pick cherries from testing. Or run testing
> and pick cherries from unstable. We can't do that in Squeak. Yet... SM
> is aiming for that capability in the end.

Yes, you can run stable and cherry pick apps from Testing/Unstable.
That is reasonably true now. Before it wasn't so easy. Potato has 
different libc than Woody. So that created problems. But since both 
Woody and Sarge have libc6 (?) it works much better.

However, I have no experience with such since I run Sid. It is more 
stable than any Windows (XP home, 95, ME) or MacOS (7.x, 8.x) I've ever 
run. I don't think XP Pro or OSX would be much more stable for me. 
Possibly easier to use or configure, but not much more stable. Anytime 
I've had to restart it wasn't OS related.

To do this with SM it would be nice/necessary to have not necessarily 
the image labelled stable/testing/unstable but rather the individually 
installed packages labelled as such. That way when you update all 
installed packages it "just does the right thing" TM. :)

Also in Debian parlance, you can also "upgrade" packages/distributions.
When you upgrade you go from Stable or Testing to Testing or Unstable.
Something similar would be nice if say someone wanted to go from stable
Comanche 1.0 to ComancheNG (if they had same names) for example. Or if 
say the socket code was switched from what it is to Flow. An SM means to 
handle such would be nice.

Updates occur within a distribution, upgrades move from one distribution 
to another.

Jimmie Houchin



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