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."
Mr. 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!" 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."
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 facilite 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.
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 amateur radio operators. Finding that the Debian core system needed further work to support his project, Bruce ended up working heavily on the base system and related installation tools, and postponed his ham radio distribution. The work Bruce did on the installation toolset led eventually to today's Rescue Floppy design.
Mr. 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.
Mr. 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:
dpkg
)
There were several interim "point" releases made to 1.3, with the last being 1.3.1R6.
http://www.debian.org/News/1999/19990309 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.
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 (libc6, based on glibc2). 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
. This is the first
port to use a non-Linux kernel, instead using the GNU Hurd
, which
itself is based around the GNU Mach microkernel.
The Debian developers are currently working on Debian 2.2, which has been
code-named Potato. This version will include better support for the
new Linux File Hierarchy Standard. It will also use the new egcs
compiler as it's default
compiler, and those architectures using Linux kernels will use the new Linux
2.2.X series kernels. It is hoped that the powerpc
and arm
architectures will also
be released with 2.2.
bdale@debian.org