Debian always has at least
three releases in active maintenance: stable
, testing
and
unstable
.
The stable
distribution contains the latest officially
released distribution of Debian.
This is the production release of Debian, the one which we primarily recommend using.
The current stable
distribution of Debian GNU/Linux is version
4.0r6, codenamed etch. It was
released on December 18th, 2008.
The testing
distribution contains packages that haven't been
accepted into a stable
release yet, but they are in the queue for
that. The main advantage of using this distribution is that it has more
recent versions of software.
See the Debian FAQ for more information on
what is testing
and how it becomes
stable
.
The current testing
distribution is lenny.
The unstable
distribution is where active development of Debian
occurs. Generally, this distribution is run by developers and those
who like to live on the edge.
The unstable
distribution is called sid.
lenny— no release date has been set
etch) — current stable release
sarge) — obsolete stable release
woody) — obsolete stable release
potato) — obsolete stable release
slink) — obsolete stable release
hamm) — obsolete stable release
The web pages for the obsolete Debian releases are kept intact, but the releases themselves can only be found in a separate archive.
See the Debian FAQ for an explanation of where all these codenames came from.
Data integrity is granted by a digitally signed Release
file. To ensure that all files in the release belong to it, MD5 checksums of
all Packages files are copied into the Release
file.
Digital signatures for this file are stored in the file
Release.gpg, using the current version of the archive signing
key.