Re: A case study of a new user turned off debian
Graham Wilson <graham@debian.org> writes:
> > Regardless. Having people install fresh machines with things like
> > Postgres 7.2 is just embarrassing.
>
> I am not embarrassed.
Well perhaps you should be. Whenever they ask for support those users will be
told the version their running is hopelessly out of date and all the trouble
their having is because of their choice of version. (Actually the postgres
list does an admirable job of attempting to provide support for 7.2 and even
7.1 but inevitably the answer turns out to be "that problem was fixed in 7.3.
Or now, 7.4.)
Those users will also be struggling with major production issues like being
unable to run 24x7 because of required periodic maintenance (vacuum and
reindex) that require downtime.
Basically, given that 7.3 has been out for an entire release cycle (7.4 will
be released within days), giving 7.2 to new users is simply ridiculous.
The same holds for having new users install 2.2 kernels or XFree86 4.1. I
mean, sure there are cases when these things are passable or even useful, but
by default telling a new user that these awful buggy releases are what he or
she should be installing on a fresh install is just, well, as I said,
embarrassing.
Personally I'm of the opinion that stable is useless. It certainly has no use
for me. Perhaps if I ran a production server on debian I might think otherwise
but I rather doubt it. When I had production servers they all ran 2.4 and
needed the latest stable releases of anything important like database, mail,
web server services.
If I ran production servers on debian today I would probably pick an arbitrary
date off snapshot.debian.org and declare that my "stable". If I had security
problems I would pick a date recent enough to have the security fixes, test
it, and declare it "stable".
It wouldn't be guaranteed to be bug-free, but then nothing is. Stable has tons
of minor bugs that no upstream maintainer would listen to because they were
fixed aeons ago anyways, or more likely are no longer relevant in current
sources.
--
greg
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