Ubuntu Unravelled

“I’m aware that nearly all people in the Linux ecosphere
are familiar with what Ubuntu is. However, it is my impression that
many people, including some Ubuntu users, do not know how the
distribution is made. Most are familiar with the principle that
Ubuntu is largely based upon the Debian distribution, but not a
great deal beyond this.

“To give you a quick introduction to Debian, it is an entirely
community-based distribution, although some of the contributors are
large businesses. No single company has overall control or official
end user support. Debian is made up of three separate releases:
‘Stable’, ‘Testing’ and
‘Unstable’. Each release is given a codename from a
character in the movie Toy Story. It took me some time to realise
this. When a new upstream application version enters Debian, it is
uploaded to the unstable repositories and generally, depending on
bugs raised, will cascade into testing. When testing is considered
reasonably stable and ‘release blocker’ bugs are
resolved, it is ordained to be the next stable release. This
process produces a very stable platform when it is released.
However, the applications available in stable can often become
quite old. Consequently, many Debian users actually use the
‘testing’ version on their everyday machines.”

Complete
Story