Devuan Release Information

Devuan release codenames

Devuan release codenames are chosen from the Minor Planet Center Names List. The first Devuan stable release, Jessie, mirrors Debian’s Jessie (a Toy Story character). Future release names follow in alphabetical order starting with the letter A, then B etc. ASCII, Beowulf, Chimaera and Daedalus have already been chosen.

An exception to this pattern is unstable, which always has the codename ceres - minor planet number 1 - which is an alias for Debian’s sid.

Devuan suites

Devuan development takes place in suites that indicate a level of stability:

• stable is the current officially released suite of Devuan. It is the suite recommended for use in production.
• testing is where the next stable suite is developed. Software is usually more up-to-date but there may still be issues. testing becomes stable “when it is ready”.
• unstable is where developers refine and stabilize the latest package versions.
• experimental is where the newest packages are tested before moving to unstable.

When the current testing moves to stable, the previous stable transitions to oldstable and a snapshot of unstable becomes the new testing.

Codenames or suites?

The release codenames or suite designations in /etc/apt/sources.list indicate which release will be used when updating and upgrading packages. Note that the suite names stable and testing will refer to different releases over time.

As of this writing, stable refers to Devuan ASCII (Debian Stretch) and testing refers to Devuan Beowulf (Debian Buster). Once Beowulf is officially released, stable will refer to Beowulf and testing will refer to the next release in development, Chimaera (Debian Bullseye).

However, if your ASCII sources.list refers to the release codename ascii you will remain on ASCII until you change your sources.list. That means that you will have more control over when the upgrade happens. And if you are using beowulf in your sources.list you will move seamlessly to the new stable version of Beowulf when it is released.

To avoid the possibility of mixing two potentially incompatible repositories, Devuan recommends using release codenames in sources.list.

Source list information