LMDE v. Jessie

[bigbenaugust]

As we all know, Debian Wheezy has been frozen in preparation for the Debian 7.0 release early next year and the next version of testing has been named Jessie.

Source: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/07/msg00004.html from the Debian release guys.

So how will the transition from Wheezy to Jessie be handled by LMDE when 7.0 goes gold next year? Will we be able to change the repos and then do a dist-upgrade, or is a clean install a better idea? I suspect the latter.

For the record, I like LMDE quite a bit. It's within a few packages of what I was manually setting up on all of my Debian desktops, just as stable, and more modern. I'm just curious as to what the distro maintainers think about this.

(and this only went into the Newbies forum because I didn't know where else to put it.)

[den68]

Hi,
LMDE will just keep snapshoting the testing repos, independent of the Debian Stable version, from what I understand.
So there won't be a transition from Wheezy to Jessie per se.

[zerozero]

as den68 is saying above lmde is (always was) tracking testing (even if now with the update-packs it follows a different approach but still based directly in testing);

so, in short, the deep-freeze affects lmde because it slows development but in any way will require a change or a reconfiguration (or even a reinstall) of the system);

as soon as wheezy is released as stable and jessie becomes the new testing branch (somewhere next year i presume) those following the default lmde-setup (with repos pointing to latest) will have normal updates.

[ddurdle]

I'm looking forward to the updates.

[bigbenaugust]

All right, thank you.

I thought at some point, they just said "okay, Wheezy is the new stable, so let's snapshot sid to be the new testing" and there would be some big lurch forward when Wheezy goes gold. A misunderstanding on my part. I guess they just keep rolling sid packages into testing when the freeze is up.

[zerozero]

actually in part your concerns were right (but they don't affect lmde anymore because since the introduction of the update-packs we have ways of controlling that influx)

last time (fev 2011 viewtopic.php?f=201&t=65740&start=0) still with the original lmde setup (tracking directly testing) the end of the deep-freeze was interesting because then there's a backlog of development that hits the newly created testing.

during this deep-freeze sid slows down (mainly because the debian devs are focused in releasing stable in the best shape possible) but doesn't stop and a couple weeks after the freeze is over there's an huge update in testing.

this time lmde will be safe from that: the UP will create a buffer giving the users stability.

[widget]

actually in part your concerns were right (but they don't affect lmde anymore because since the introduction of the update-packs we have ways of controlling that influx)

last time (fev 2011 viewtopic.php?f=201&t=65740&start=0) still with the original lmde setup (tracking directly testing) the end of the deep-freeze was interesting because then there's a backlog of development that hits the newly created testing.

during this deep-freeze sid slows down (mainly because the debian devs are focused in releasing stable in the best shape possible) but doesn't stop and a couple weeks after the freeze is over there's an huge update in testing.

this time lmde will be safe from that: the UP will create a buffer giving the users stability.

I agree with almost all of this.

The only thing that I can say is not completely correct is when the deluge of packages hits the "testing" repo.

I installed Squeeze when it was testing. Was planning on using it as my production OS. Feel in love with testing. Changed my sources.list from reading "squeeze" to "testing".

The very day tbat Squeez went "stable" I had over 1000 packages to be upgraded in testing. There really was no pause at all before that happened. Was kind of a shock as you may imagine.

At least in my case there was no problem with that huge update/upgrade cycle.

I think the average user, used to "stable" releases, is going to be a lot happier with LMDE.

The LMDE repo maintainers are probably in for a very busy time though. I am sure that they will do a supper job of it too.

[bigbenaugust]

In that case, bring on the progress. I was going to put LMDE on my office workstation, but was a little worried about what was going to happen.

The collective software QA of the Debian devs is pretty good (and this is an understatement). With the LMDE devs in front of them, I am pretty sure I have nothing to fear here.