Quoting Barry Flanagan (barryf-lists at flanagan.ie):
> Well, at present you can freely interchange woody with stable, sarge
> with testing, sid with unstable. woody will always be woody, sarge
> always sarge. However, once sarge becomes stable, sid would then become
> testing and (can't remember what they are calling the new unstable)
> would become unstable.
Well, not exactly. The mirror sites' /debian/dists/testing directory
(currently a symlink to physical directory /debian/dists/sarge) gets
auto-populated by a nightly quarantining script by whatever's new in
/debian/dists/unstable that meets automated quality checks.
The "unstable" symlink (i.e., /debian/dists/unstable) is permanently
pointed to physical directory "sid".
What you're probably thinking of, in saying "whatever they are calling
the new unstable", is the replacement target for the _"testing"_ symlink:
That'll be called "etch".
> What you have to watch is that if you install sarge now, it will set
> /etc/apt/sources.list as testing - a moving target. Once sarge goes
> stable, apt would now point to the new testing (ie. today's sid).
Not today's sid. sid is permanently the rolling development branch,
which is why the convention is that unstable=sid, always. (Sid was the
sadistic neighbour kid in "Toy Story" who enjoyed breaking toys.)
Current symlinks:
stable -> woody (3.0)
testing -> sarge (3.1)
unstable -> sid
Future post-release symlinks:
stable -> sarge (3.1)
testing -> etch (3.2? -- version # not yet declared)
unstable -> sid
> Therefore changing the sources.list to the actual proper name of the
> dist is the way to ensure that you stick with that one.
My take: Having sources.list point to...
o "stable" means you want to stay very, very far from the bleeding edge.
o "testing" means you want to stay two steps back from the cliff.
o "unstable" means you want to teeter on the edge of that cliff.
o "experimental" means you want to blithely step off, and flap your arms.
Pointing it to "sarge" means, in effect, that you want to keep two steps
back from the cliff for a while, but then suddenly change your mind on
exactly the day of sarge release, and back off to Dullsville. Either
that, or you aren't quite understanding the maintenance model.
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