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Debian (OS)
A Brief History of Debian
Contents
- 1 Introduction -- What is the Debian Project?
- 2 Leadership
- 3 Debian Releases
- 4
A Detailed History
- 4.1 The 0.x Releases
- 4.2 The 1.x Releases
- 4.3 The 2.x Releases
- 4.4 The 3.x Releases
- 4.5 Important Events
- 4.6 What's Next?
- A The Debian Manifesto
A Detailed History
4.1 The 0.x Releases
Debian was
begun in August 1993 by Ian Murdock, then an undergraduate at Purdue
University. Debian was sponsored by the GNU Project of The
Free Software Foundation, the organization started by Richard
Stallman and associated with the General Public License (GPL), for one
year -- from November 1994 to November 1995.
Debian 0.01 through Debian 0.90 were released between August and December of 1993. Ian Murdock writes:
"Debian 0.91 was released in January 1994. It had a primitive package system that allowed users to manipulate packages but that did little else (it certainly didn't have dependencies or anything like that). By this time, there were a few dozen people working on Debian, though I was still mostly putting together the releases myself. 0.91 was the last release done in this way.
Most of 1994
was spent organizing the Debian Project so that others could more
effectively contribute, as well as working on dpkg (Ian
Jackson was largely responsible for this). There were no releases to the
public in 1994 that I can remember, though there were several internal
releases as we worked to get the process right.
Debian 0.93
Release 5 happened in March 1995 and was the first "modern"
release of Debian: there were many more developers by then (though I can't
remember exactly how many), each maintaining their own packages, and dpkg
was being used to install and maintain all these packages after a base
system was installed.
"Debian 0.93 Release 6 happened in November 1995 and was the last a.out release. There were about sixty developers maintaining packages in 0.93R6. If I remember correctly, dselect first appeared in 0.93R6."
Ian Murdock also notes that Debian 0.93R6 "... has always been my favorite release of Debian", although he admits to the possibility of some personal bias, as he stopped actively working on the project in March 1996 during the pre-production of Debian 1.0, which was actually released as Debian 1.1 to avoid confusion after a CDROM manufacturer mistakenly labelled an unreleased version as Debian 1.0. That incident led to the concept of "official" CDROM images, as a way for the project to help vendors avoid this kind of mistake.
During August 1995 (between Debian 0.93 Release 5 and Debian 0.93 Release 6), Hartmut Koptein started the first port for Debian, for the Motorola m68k family. He reports that "Many, many packages were i386-centric (little endian, -m486, -O6 and all for libc4) and it was a hard time to get a starting base of packages on my machine (an Atari Medusa 68040, 32 MHz). After three months (in November 1995), I uploaded 200 packages from 250 available packages, all for libc5!" Later he started another port together with Vincent Renardias and Martin Schulze, for the PowerPC family.
Since this
time, the Debian Project has grown to include several ports
to other architectures, and a port to a new (non-Linux) kernel, the GNU
Hurd microkernel.
An early member of the project, Bill Mitchell, remembers the Linux kernel
"... being between 0.99r8 and 0.99r15 when we got started. For a long time, I could build the kernel in less than 30 minutes on a 20 Mhz 386-based machine, and could also do a Debian install in that same amount of time in under 10Mb of disk space.
" ... I recall the initial group as including Ian Murdock, myself, Ian Jackson, another Ian who's surname I don't recall, Dan Quinlan, and some other people who's names I don't recall. Matt Welsh was either part of the initial group or joined pretty early on (he has since left the project). Someone set up a mailing list, and we were off and running.
As I recall, we didn't start off with a plan, and we didn't start off by putting together a plan in any highly organized fashion. Right from the start, I do recall, we started off collecting up sources for a pretty random collection of packages. Over time, we came to focus on a collection of items which would be required to put together the core of a distribution: the kernel, a shell, update, getty, various other programs and support files needed to init the system, and a set of core utilities."
4.1.1 The Early Debian Packaging System
At the very
early stages of the Project, members considered distributing source-only
packages. Each package would consist of the upstream source code and a
Debianized patch file, and users would untar the sources, apply the
patches, and compile binaries themselves. They soon realized, however,
that some sort of binary distribution scheme would be needed. The earliest
packaging tool, written by Ian Murdock and called dpkg,
created a package in a Debian-specific binary format, and could be used
later to unpack and install the files in the package.
Ian Jackson
soon took over the development of the packaging tool, renaming the tool
itself dpkg-deb and writing a front-end program he named dpkg
to facilitate the use of dpkg-deb and provide the Dependencies
and Conflicts of today's Debian system. The packages produced by
these tools had a header listing the version of the tool used to create
the package and an offset within the file to a tar-produced
archive, which was seperated from the header by some control information.
At about this
time some debate arose between members of the project -- some felt that
the Debian-specific format created by dpkg-deb should be
dropped in favor of the format produced by the ar program.
After several revised file formats and correspondingly-revised packaging
tools, the ar format was adopted. The key value of this
change is that it makes it possible for a Debian package to be un-packaged
on any Unix-like system without the need to run an untrusted executable.
In other words, only standard tools present on every Unix system like 'ar'
and 'tar' are required to unpack a Debian binary package and examine the
contents.
4.2 The 1.x Releases
When Ian Murdock left Debian, he appointed Bruce Perens as the next leader of the project. Bruce first became interested in Debian while he was attempting to create a Linux distribution CD to be called "Linux for Hams", which would include all of the Linux software useful to ham radio operators. Finding that the Debian core system would require much further work to support his project, Bruce ended up working heavily on the base Linux system and related installation tools, postponing his ham radio distribution, including organizing (with Ian Murdock) the first set of Debian install scripts, eventually resulting in today's Debian Rescue Floppy.
Ian Murdock states:
"Bruce was the natural choice to succeed me, as he had been maintaining the base system for nearly a year, and he had been picking up the slack as the amount of time I could devote to Debian declined rapidly."
He initiated several important facets of the project, including coordinating the effort to produce the Debian Free Software Guidelines and the Debian Social Contract, and the initiation of The Open Hardware Project. During his time as Project Leader, Debian gained market share and a reputation as a platform for serious, technically-capable Linux users.
Bruce Perens
also spearheaded the effort to create Software
in the Public Interest, Inc.. Originally intended to provide
the Debian Project with a legal entity capable of accepting donations, its
aims quickly expanded to include supporting free software projects outside
the Debian Project.
The following Debian versions were released during this time:
-
1.1 Buzz released June 1996 (474 packages, 2.0 kernel, fully ELF,
dpkg)
-
1.2 Rex released December 1996 (848 packages, 120 developers)
-
1.3 Bo released July 1997 (974 packages, 200 developers)
There were several interim "point" releases made to 1.3, with the last being 1.3.1R6.
Bruce Perens was replaced by Ian Jackson as Debian Project Leader at the beginning of January, 1998, after leading the project much of the way through the preparation for the 2.0 release.
4.3 The 2.x Releases
Ian Jackson became the Leader of the Debian Project at the beginning of 1998, and was shortly thereafter added to the board of Software in the Public Interest in the capacity of Vice President. After the resignation of the Treasurer (Tim Sailer), President (Bruce Perens), and Secretary (Ian Murdock), he became President of the Board and three new members were chosen: Martin Schulze (Vice President), Dale Scheetz (Secretary), and Nils Lohner (Treasurer).
Debian 2.0 (Hamm) was released July 1998 for the Intel i386 and Motorola 68000 series architectures. This release marked the move to a new version of the system C libraries (glibc2 or for historical reasons libc6). At the time of release, there were 1500+ packages maintained by more than 400 Debian developers.
Wichert
Akkerman succeeded Ian Jackson as Debian Project Leader in January of
1999. Debian 2.1
was released
on 09 March, 1999, after being delayed by a week when a few last-minute
issues arose.
Debian 2.1
featured official support for two new architectures: Alpha
and Sparc.
The X-Windows packages included with Debian 2.1 were greatly reorganized
from previous releases, and 2.1 included apt, the
next-generation Debian package manager interface. Also, this release of
Debian was the first to require 2 CD-ROMs for the "Official Debian CD
set"; the distribution included about 2250 packages.
On 21 April
1999, Corel Corporation
and the K Desktop Project
effectively formed an alliance with Debian when Corel announced it's
intentions to release a Linux distribution based on Debian and the desktop
environment produced by the KDE group. During the following spring and
summer months, another Debian-based distribution, Storm Linux, appeared,
and the Debian Project chose a new logo,
featuring both an Official version for use on Debian-sanctioned materials
such as CD-ROMs and official Project websites, and an Unofficial logo for
use on material mentioning or derived from Debian.
A new,
unique, Debian port also began at this time, for the Hurd
port. This is the first port to use a non-Linux kernel, instead using the GNU
Hurd, a version of the GNU Mach microkernel.
Debian 2.2 (potato) was released August 15th, 2000 for the Intel i386, Motorola 68000 series, alpha, SUN Sparc, PowerPC and ARM architectures. This is the first release including PowerPC and ARM ports. At the time of release, there were 3900+ binary and 2600+ source packages maintained by more than 450 Debian developers.
An
interesting fact about Debian 2.2 is that it showed how an free software
effort could lead to a modern operating system despite all the issues
around it. This was studied thoroughly by a group of interest in an
article called Counting
potatoes quoting from this article:
"[...] we use David A. Wheeler's sloccount system to determine the number of physical source lines of code (SLOC) of Debian 2.2 (aka potato). We show that Debian 2.2 includes more than 55,000,000 physical SLOC (almost twice than Red Hat 7.1, released about 8 months later), showing that the Debian development model (based on the work of a large group of voluntary developers spread around the world) is at least as capable as other development methods [...] It is also shown that if Debian had been developed using traditional proprietary methods, the COCOMO model estimates that its cost would be close to $1.9 billion USD to develop Debian 2.2. In addition, we offer both an analysis of the programming languages used in the distribution (C amounts for about 70%, C++ for about 10%, LISP and Shell are around 5%, with many others to follow), and the largest packages (Mozilla, the Linux kernel, PM3, XFree86, etc.)"
4.4 The 3.x Releases
Before woody
could even begin to be prepared for release, a change to the archive
system on ftp-master had to be made. Package pools, which enabled special
purpose distributions, such as the new "Testing" distribution
used for the first time to get woody ready for release, were activated
on ftp-master in mid December 2000. A package pool is just a
collection of different versions of a given package, from which multiple
distributions (currently experimental, unstable, testing, and stable) can
draw packages, which are then included in that distribution's Packages
file.
At the same time a new distribution testing was introduced. Mainly, packages from unstable that are said to be stable moved to testing (after a period of a few weeks). This was introduced in order to reduce freeze time and give the project the ability to prepare a new release at any time.
In that period, some of the companies that were shipping modified versions of Debian closed down, starting with Corel, who sold its Linux division in the first quarter of 2001, closely followed by Stormix declared bankrupcy on January 17th 2001, and, lastly, Progeny ceased development of its distribution on October 1st, 2001.
The freeze
for the next release started on july 1st 2001. However, it took the
project a little more than a year to get to the next release, due to problems
in boot-floppies, because of the introduction of cryptographic
software in the main archive and due to changes the changes in the
underlying architecture (the incoming archive and the security
architecture). In that time, however, the stable release (Debian 2.2) was
revised up to seven times, and two Project Leaders were elected: Ben
Collins (in 2001) and Bdale Garbee. Also, work in many areas of Debian
besides packaging kept growing, including internationalization, Debian's
web site (over a thousand webpages) was translated into over 20 different
languages, and installation for the next release was ready in 23
languages. Two internal projects: Debian Junior (for children) and Debian
Med (for medical practice and research) started during the woody release
time frame providing the project with different focuses to make Debian
suitable for those tasks.
The work around Debian didn't stop the developers of organising an annual meeting called Debconf. The first meeting was held from the 2nd to the 5th of July together with the Libre Software Meeting (LSM) at Bordeaux (France) gathered around forty Debian developers. The second conference took place in Toronto (Canada) July 5th 2002 with over eighty participants.
Debian 3.0 (woody) was released July 19th, 2002 for the Intel i386, Motorola 68000 series, alpha, SUN Sparc, PowerPC, ARM, HP PA-RISC, IA-64, MIPS, MIPS (DEC) and IBM s/390 architectures. This is the first release including HP PA-RISC, IA-64, MIPS, MIPS (DEC) and IBM s/390 ports. At the time of release, there were 9000+ binary packages maintained by more than one thousand Debian developers, becoming the first release to be available on DVD media as well as CD-ROMs.
4.5 Important Events
4.5.1 July 2000: Joel Klecker died
On July 11th,
2000, Joel Klecker, who was also known as Espy, passed away at 21 years of
age. No one who saw 'Espy' in #mklinux, the Debian lists or channels knew
that behind this nickname was a young man suffering from a form of Duchenne
muscular dystrophy. Most people only knew him as 'the Debian
glibc and powerpc guy' and had no idea of the hardships Joel fought.
Though physically impaired, he shared his great mind with others.
Joel Klecker (also known as Espy) will be missed.
4.5.2 October 2000: Implementation of Package Pools
James Troup reported
that he has been working on re-implementing the archive maintenance tools
and switching to package pools. From this date, files are stored in a
directory named after the corresponding source packackge inside of the
pools directory. The distribution directories will only contain Packages
files that contain references to the pool. This simplifies overlapping
distributions such as testing and unstable. The archive is also
database-driven using PostgreSQL which also speeds up lookups.
4.5.3 March 2001: Christopher Rutter died
On March 1st, 2001, Christopher Matthew Rutter (also known as cmr) was killed after he was struck by a car at the age of 19. Christopher was a young and well known member of the Debian project helping the ARM port.
4.5.4 March 2001: Fabrizio Polacco died
On March 28th, 2001, Fabrizio Polacco passed away after a long illness. The Debian Project honors his good work and strong dedication to Debian and Free Software. The contributions of Fabrizio will not be forgotten, and other developers will step forward to continue his work.
Fabrizio Polacco will be missed.
4.5.5 Juli 2002: Martin Butterweck died
On July 21st, 2002, Martin Butterweck (also known as blendi) died after battling leukemia. Martin was a young member of the Debian project who recently joined the project.
Martin Butterweck will be missed.
4.5.6 November 2002: Fire burnt Debian server
Around 08:00 CET on November 20th, 2002, the University of Twente Network Operations Center (NOC) caught fire. The building has burnt to the ground. The fire department has given up every hope on protecting the server area. Among other things the NOC hosted satie.debian.org which contained both the security and non-US archive as well as the new-maintainer (nm) and quality assurance (qa) databases. Debian rebuilt these services on the host klecker, which was recently moved from the U.S.A. to the Netherlands.
4.6 What's Next?
The Debian Project continues to work on the unstable distribution (codenamed sid, after the evil and "unstable" kid next door from the movie Toy Story who should never be let out into the world) Sid is the permanent name for the unstable distribution and is always 'Still In Development'. Most new or updated packages are uploaded into this distribution.
The testing release is intended to become the next stable release and is currently codenamed sarge. Packages migrate semi-automatically from unstable to testing by the current release manager, Anthony Towns, and some scripts to keep integrity.
For sarge, Debian is working towards a new installation framework named debian-installer, the new Glibc 2.3 and the new GNU GCC 3.2.
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