Data Circle

Many people, including myself, have never really got the hand of how the Debian release scheme works. What’s the different between stable, unstable and testing? What are all these strange codenames that appear to be references to the Disney film Toy Story? Although there is some official release documentation, it’s not very clear and is spread out over several different documents.

Thankfully, PerfDave has written a document entitled Debian Release Nomenclature, which explains the whole process in a much more concise and simplified manner than the official Debian documentation. It’s a useful piece of material to read for anyone running a Debian machine (even though I’m a FreeBSD man normally, the virtual machine providing backup mail and DNS services for most of my domains runs Debian).