Re: Potato

[Stephen Pitts <smpitts@midsouth.rr.com>]

On Tue, Jul 27, 1999 at 04:39:06PM -0700, Account for Debian group mail wrote:
> 
> Anyone using the Potato release on a machine that needs to be up.  How
> stable is it at this point?

I'd say go for it. I've been running it on both of my home machines 
with no problem since before the slink release. 
The last major fiasco was the perl upgrade, and all that
entailed for me was grabbing the source for a couple of packages
and rebuilding them to depend on perl5 instead of perl. 

Before that, there was a mysql reorganization, but I
just put all of the mysql* packages on hold and 
waited for it to sort out.

Before that, I survived the glibc2.1 upgrade with the only
casualty being Java. I've never had a severe problem with
potato itself, but the 2.2.10 kernel ate a filesystem on
my workstation box. On the advice of this list, 
I'm back with 2.2.7.

As far as uptimes go, my potato based server 
(Apache, Zope, NFS, Samba, IP-Masquerading, et. al)
with 10 GB of Ethernet traffic has a 20 day uptime (since
the last power outage over here). 

IMHO, the unstable dist is Debian's greatest strength (work of
over 100 developers upgrading/improving in tandem..always 
bleeding edge..everything you need is in there), and the
stable dist is Debian's greatest weakness (can't focus
and organize well enough to produce releases more than
twice/thrice a year).

Also, if you look at it from an ideological POV, you can 
help the Debian dist out by reporting any/all bugs you find.
I've found a couple, and the maintainers are very courteous
about fixing them, especially on the rare occasions I included
a patch.
-- 
Stephen Pitts
smpitts@midsouth.rr.com
webmaster - http://www.mschess.org