debian and net access

[Ben Pfaff]

"Marcel Kunath" <kunathma@pilot.msu.edu> writes:

> Now I understand you can install debian over ftp, which is
> usually my preferred way of installations, via dselect and then
> update via ftp with apt-get.

(HTTP is usually faster than FTP but it's the same idea.)

> What I'd like to know is how Debian organizes its package structure. I will
> most likely be limited in the future on speed and amount of downloads and
> wonder if packages are all kept in one place(single server) or strewn apart
> across the world (I heard comments like "add this server to your apt-get list").

99% of Debian packages are on ftp.debian.org and its mirrors.
There are something like 7000 packages in the `unstable' Debian
distribution.

> I probably would be interested in downloading Debian installation to disk and
> burn it to CD and as well any updates which exist.

Go to http://cdimage.debian.org

> Another question I had was that Debian has three releases going at one time
> stable, testing, unstable. If one uses stable today and it runs fine and then
> suddenly Debian makes the switch that testing becomes stable and unstable
> becomes testing how does this affect me as user. Do I have to watch that I now
> get archaic packages for my "stable" release and not the newly stable packages?
> Do they move the directories around? How does this work?

Every release has a name.  The current stable release is
`potato', the testing release is `woody', the unstable release is
`sid'.  When `woody' is released, stable will become `woody' and
`potato' will move to archive.debian.org soon after.  By default
apt is set up to mirror `stable', so the next apt run will
upgrade between distributions if you let it.

Directories aren't moved, it's just a symlink that gets changed.
dists/stable points to dists/woody, not dists/potato.