Martin Geisler Online

The next stable version of [Debian][] codenamed Sarge was supposed to be released today… They have either done it in a really quiet way, or not at all — I fear that they missed their target date again.

It’s a shame, for I guess there are still some server admins out there who are waiting for a new stable version of Debian — I’ve been running the “testing” distribution for a long time and I’m very satisfied with the stability of it.

My original plan was to stick with Sarge and thus obtain a system which would be stable and only receive security updates. I’m actually not sure anymore if I’ll do that, or if I’ll keep moving along with “testing”. Any Debian users out there — what do you plan to do?

The release of Sarge, the next version of [Debian][], is coming nearer and nearer — in the last release update sent out the target is Monday, June 6th (I’m making a link already, for I imagine that I will write about it… :-)

I hope they are going to make it — the Release Team and the Debian developers have worked very hard the last couple of months to make Sarge a super release. I’ve been following the mailinglists and I’ve been stunned to see the amount of care and hard work these guys put into this: upgrades are being tested (on eleven architectures…), translations are being updated, and bugs are being fixed. Very impressive!

The [Debian][] release manager Steve Langasek has announced that Sarge is now frozen! The plan is to make the release at the end of this month.

The announcement was titeled “Release update: editorial changes to the testing propagation scripts” — a nice subtle reference to the General Resolution passed last year which had a similarly innocent-looking title: “General Resolution: Editorial amendments to the social contract”. It was in this GR the Debian developers decided that they don’t want to ship files covered by the GNU Free Documentation License since it violates the Debian Free Software Guidelines (the “invariant sections” made possible by the GFDL are part of the problem, see this page for many more arguments). The problem with banning GFDL material is that many manuals are covered by the license, and many import ones that is, for example all the manuals produced by GNU for Emacs, GCC, etc. So for Etch we will probably have to find those manuals in the non-free section — a little odd IMHO, but this is how things look at the moment.

But let’s not dwell on those points now — Sarge will be here soon and that’s reason for celebration!

This is too funny: Everything you need to get your release out.

I’ve been looking for a hosting provider that would give me PHP5 at a decent price. NETsite have already upgraded to PHP5, but they’re somewhat expensive, demanding 111 DKK (about 15€) a month. There are plenty of other Danish hosting providers that will give me much more space for far less money.

Finding someone who can provide PHP5 is rather difficult. Neither FastTech, Webdomain, freepaq, NeedHost, nor Dkx can provide a PHP5 solution… At Powerhosting I could buy my own server and then get PHP5 on it, but it would be more expensive than staying with NETsite.

At ComSupport Gruppen they are waiting for official Debian of PHP5 — but those packages have been stalled for over six months now… It’s a bit unclear why Debian hasn’t got any PHP5 packages by now, especially since Piotr Roszatycki uploaded them a couple of months ago. But apparently they weren’t acceptable to the ftpmasters. But instead of working on getting the packages acceptable things just stopped :-( I think that’s rather sad… Debian is about to release Sarge, and having PHP5 in it would be a nice plus, especially if it would mean that people would upgrade to it.