[plug] Debian Sarge - was Re: [plug] next distro?

[Cameron Patrick]

Bret Busby wrote:

> > State of Sarge Debian-Installer: Broken. Joey Hess [30]looked at
> > sarge's debian-installer and concluded that it is broken. He sees many
> > instances of changes that break dependencies. He thought it likely
> > that sid's d-i now has less bugs than sarge's and that sid is
> > diverging too far from sarge for it to be easy to keep maintaining
> > sarge. He may throw away the plan of incremental copying of binary
> > packages into sarge, and revert to taking a snapshot, hoping that it
> > mostly works and copying everything to sarge in one go for a release.
> 
> From the above, I get the impression that the Debian installer for 
> Sarge, is broken.
> 
> Perhaps, I have misinterpreted that?

Yes.  Much like there are sarge and sid branches of Debian, there are
also sarge and sid branches of d-i; both of them can install either
sarge or sid, but sarge_d-i is the testing/beta release of the
/installer/ and sid_d-i is the bleeding edge release of the installer.
The idea was, after beta 4 they'd only let in new packages that fixed
bugs, and then they'd have a release candidate ready for a few weeks
ago.  Problem was, people added big new features and rewrote things
and so on, and the versions in sarge_d-i became really old and new
fixed packages couldn't move in because they required the nice new
features and basically, it wasn't working.

So sarge_d-i was abandoned (I think it's currently a symlink to
sid_d-i), and sid_d-i (a.k.a. the daily builds) is what you want to
use.  The new plan is that the next beta release (beta 5) will just be
"sid_d-i as such and such a day, where the developers tested it and
nothing seems to be broken".

Cameron.