Devuan Release Information

Devuan release codenames

Stable releases

In development

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, Daedalus, Excalibur, and Freia 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.

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 Daedalus (Debian Bookworm) and testing refers to Devuan Excalibur (Debian Trixie). Once Excalibur is officially released, stable will refer to Excalibur and testing will refer to the next release in development, Freia (Debian Forky).

However, if your Daedalus sources.list refers to the release codename daedalus you will remain on Daedalus until you change your sources.list. That means that you will have more control over when the upgrade happens. And if you are using excalibur in your sources.list you will move seamlessly to the new stable version of Excalibur 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

Archive

At its End of Life (EOL), a release will be considered archived and awarded a status of the same name. This essentially means:

• it is frozen
• no development will occur on it
• it won't receive updates, including security ones
• its assets will be distributed from a specific archive endpoint