On Wednesday, January 22, 2003, at 01:20 pm, Eduard Bloch wrote:
It is flawed. It was from the beginning. Testing is either reliable (since the criterium to make a package go to does not really depend on how many upstream bugs have been fixed), nor secure since there seem tobe no real motivation to make security updates from it. Testing has beendefined as a shadow of Unstable, but supposed to play the role of frozen. Created to confuse the developers, to create hardly explainable interrupts in the Sid developments, to make major flaws appear less harmful and keep whinning users quiet.
Oh do behave. Testing is a perfectly useful distribution for a machine which needs things which are not in stable, is being run by someone who doesn't want the extra hassles of tracking unstable, and is either not in a situation where security is a serious problem or could take packages from unstable when security updates dictate.
It becomes progressively more useful as we get further from the last release and nearer to the next -- which doesn't mean it's not useful at the start of that period.
If we had the resources and inclination to "do" security updates for it then that would make it, in practice, probably the most useful of all 3 distributions for most users.
Cheers, Nick