debian and net access

Ben Pfaff pfaffben@msu.edu
12 Jul 2001 10:01:10 -0400


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

> I will probably wait til Debian 3.0 is released but I am quite
> curious already.  I had a closer look at the directory
> structure.
> 
> I compare stable/non-free/i386/admin and testing/non-free/i386/admin
> directories.
> 
> The former contains 4 files and the latter 1 file. How does
> this work?

non-free is a pretty small category.  We try to avoid putting
packages there.  `main' is going to be a lot bigger.

> A person installs debian stable and then upgrades to testing
> and the testing directories only include added and updated
> packages but not all distro originals? One cannot install
> testing without installing stable at first? The same holds true
> for unstable?

The three distributions work in different ways:

	* stable is the latest release.  It doesn't change
          much--only when important bugs are found, and we test
          the distribution well enough in advance of release that
          that doesn't happen often.

	* unstable is where new packages are installed by
          developers.  It changes quickly and in arbitrary ways.

	* testing gets packages from unstable installed into it
          automatically when they've been around for a while and
          not had any important bugs filed against them.

The file structure is currently in transition.  If you look at
the stable distribution, most of the packages are installed
directly into the appropriate directories.  On the other hand,
the directories for testing and unstable are pretty bare.  This
is because the Packages files for these distribution point into
the `pool' directory, where most of the actual packages are
stored these days.  This is done for efficient mirroring.

> There is directories for all the platforms and then an
> "binary-all" directory.  Does this mean directory i386 is only
> a subset of the needed packages and one also needs the
> "binary-all" directory to install properly?

The binary-all directory consists of packages that will work on
any architecture; e.g., Perl, Python, Java, or shell programs.
The other archs have symlinks into binary-all as appropriate.
-- 
Regarding a Microsoft/Xerox agreement:
	"This is a match made in heaven. 
	 Both companies excel at copying other people's work."
--douglas@min.net <URL:http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/05/16/2211252>