A Short History of Debian

In late 1993, a college student and computer enthusiast named Ian Murdock was using SLS, an early distribution of Linux. He liked Linux but found himself disappointed that SLS had many problems and that, even worse, new releases of it failed to fix many of them. Convinced that this was mostly due to an overloaded, overworked maintainer, he decided to adapt the model used in the development of Linux itself and use it to create a new distribution with a decidedly different philosophy. He called the new distribution ``Debian Linux'', and it was to be developed by a distributed group of volunteers. This group was completely open and anyone was welcome to get involved.

Ian posted his intentions to the Usenet in August of 1993 and immediately found outside interest in his idea, including that of the Free Software Foundation, the creators of much of the core software of all Linux-based systems. Ian credits this early interest as being pivotal to the acceptance of Debian into the free software world.

Through the fall and winter of 1993, development of Debian proceeded through several internal releases, culminating in the public release of Debian 0.91 in January of 1994. Debian 0.91 gave the world its first glimpse of the Debian philosophy in action. By this time, a dozen or so people were involved in development, though Ian was still largely packaging and integrating the releases himself.

After the first public release of Debian, attention was turned toward developing the package system called dpkg. A rudimentary dpkg existed in Debian 0.91, but at that time was mostly used for manipulating packages once they were installed, rather than as a general packaging utility. By the summer of 1994, early versions of dpkg were becoming usable, and other people besides Ian began to join in the packaging and integration process by following guidelines that explained how to construct packages that were modular and integrated into the system without causing problems.

By the fall of 1994, an overloaded Ian Murdock, now coordinating the efforts of dozens of people in addition to his own development work, transferred responsibility of the package system to Ian Jackson, who proceeded to make many invaluable enhancements, and shaped it into the current system.

After months of hard work and organization, the Debian Project finally made its first distributed release in March of 1995, Debian 0.93 Release 5. Debian 0.92 had never been released, and Release 1 through Release 4 of Debian 0.93 had been development releases made throughout the fall and winter of 1994.

By this time, the Debian Project, as it had come to be called, had grown to include over sixty people. In the summer of 1995, Ian Murdock transferred responsibility of the base system, the core set of Debian packages, to Bruce Perens, giving Ian time to devote to the management of the growing Project. Work continued throughout the summer and fall, and a final a.out binary format release, Debian 0.93 Release 6, was made in November of 1995 before attention turned to converting the system to the ELF binary format.

Ian Murdock left the Debian Project in March of 1996 to devote more time to his family and to finishing school; Bruce Perens assumed the leadership role, guiding the Project through its first ELF release, Debian 1.1, in June 1996.