> > AFAIR, we already had agreed on a definition like this: experimental > is only for `dangerous' software, which is likely to damage your system. > Every thing else (even alpha versions) may go into unstable. How about "known to be broken in a fundamental way". It's really a matter of degree. For example, an xemacs package that still has a few rough edges and bugs in its MULE support goes into unstable. An xemacs package that can't be used to edit straight ascii text anymore would go into experimental. A dpkg-ftp which can't even be used to upgrade your system successfully (i.e. 1.5.0) goes into experimental. etc. How about unstable: yeah, it dumps core when you do Control-Shift-Meta-F12, the menu entry is broken and there's a missing symlink that makes the urlview helper program unusable, but it mostly work. You can still do productive work with that package. experimental: once you've installed this version, don't expect to be able to do productive work with the package. (And that's if you're lucky. If you're unlucky, it'll eat /dev/hda for lunch.) The main reason you might want to install this is to help me get it into an at least somewhat usable state. Hopefully someone can rephrase the distinction in more generic terms. Christian
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