Re: Bits from the Release Team - Kicking off Wheezy
On Sun, May 01, 2011 at 04:01:20PM -0400, Joey Hess wrote:
> Pierre Habouzit wrote:
> > FWIW I think that "rolling" or "CUT" miss the point entirely. As a
> > Debian user I use stable on my servers (with a few backports for the 3-4
> > things I need bleeding edge for). For my desktop I use unstable, and
> > when that breaks (which is *very* rare, really) I go to snapshots and go
> > back a few versions. I couldn't care about testing any less. And at
> > work, every person I know either uses just stable or does the same as
> > me. I know no testing user around me. Of course I'm not pretending I
> > know the absolute Truth, but well, I find this whole "users want testing
> > badly" thing dubious.
>
> Consider all the users who are running stable, plus a backport of some
> servers, or a chromium or firefox installed from upstream because
> stable's is too old. Consider the users who have so many backports
> installed that they start to encounter integration problems between
> them. Consider users who install Ubuntu because there is no usable
> Debian release with a kernel new enough for their hardware, but then
> have to fight with it to disable some "Unity" thing. These are all
> use cases for CUT.
Who are they? Unlike this constant handwaving, I've shared my experience
(on #-devel), I'll repeat it here: at work we've like 10 Debian users,
some with stable, the other with unstable. Why? Because we're
developpers and if our software targets old stuff (RH5, it's as old as
lenny), the latest gcc, valgrind, … are priceless tools, and we want
them.
I run unstable on my laptop and workstation for years, with almost daily
dist-upgrades. Except for grub2 (and I've been stupid, I removed grub, I
should have known better) I've had no serious issues for 5 years,
nothing that prevented a boot, almost nothing that prevented X to start,
and absolutely nothing that a revert to testing or using
snapshots.debian.org couldn't fix (plus a dpkg-hold for good measure).
At work something like 6 different people use that setup, and we have
complex boots with dm-raid, lvm, cryptsetup, it never broke.
Those are real users from real life. I'm not saying "we"-re
representative of a majority of Debian Users, but unlike all the
handwaived users we've read about in this thread, those are real. Could
someone here explain with a real life example who the users who badly
need CUT/rolling are, and explain to me why unstable isn't a good choice
for them (and no, unstable brokeness doesn't CUT it — sorry I had to do
it — my experience proves it's rare).
--
·O· Pierre Habouzit
··O madcoder@debian.org
OOO http://www.madism.org
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