ubuntu/debian repos

[Martin Geisler]

"Ken Blake" <kblake2 at gmail.com> writes:

> I've been meaning to ask about why the Ubuntu hardy repo was so out
> of date. It currently has v0.9.5. I googled Vincent and found this
> page:
> http://www-id.imag.fr/Laboratoire/Membres/Danjean_Vincent/deb.html#mercurial
> which shows the package name to be mercurial_1.0-7~bpo40+1_i386.deb
> which I assume means it is version 1.0.

Correct, but the "bpo" part also tells you that this is a package for
backports.org -- a place where people upload newer versions of
packages for the stable Debian releases.

> But when I look at the Debian site:
> http://packages.debian.org/etch/mercurial it lists mercurial
> (0.9.1-1+etch1) which implies an even older version than Ubuntu.

The current stable Debian release is etch, and this was released in
April 2007. The next stable release (the "testing" distribution called
lenny) will contain 1.0.1:

  http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=mercurial

> So my interpretation of this is Ubuntu and Debian are not in sync
> and Vincent has done an upgrade but it hasn't been accepted yet? I
> don't really know how these things work.

Debian has an unstable distribution where new stuff is uploaded. After
14 days (normally) a package can move to the testing distribution
provided that no new bugs were reported. Once in a while the testing
distribution is released -- it is then called stable. Packages in
stable receive security updates only, even if projects release newer
versions.

-- 
Martin Geisler

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