Re: Danger Will Robinson! Danger!
Steve Greenland (stevegr@debian.org) wrote:
> Which is it? Do your friends want the newest bleeding edge stuff, or
> do they want stability? They can't have both at the same time! Oh, I
> see, the want the newest, but they want us to call it "stable".
I don't know.. IMO unstable is often more stable then any rathat
release! I don't care personally what it's called as long as it works.
You are right they want it to be called "stable".
> Why is is this basic distinction so hard to explain to people? Testing
> and reliability take time. During that time, new features are going to
> show up in various parts of the system. Along with those new features
> come compatibility and reliability problems. You can either have the new
> features, or you can have a tested, stable, reliable *system*. *YOU*
> *CAN'T* *HAVE* *BOTH*.
I don't know why it's impossible to get it through their thick skulls,
but it is. When I finally upgraded to potato it was because I needed a
newer kernel to work with two pieces of hardware that was unsupported by
2.0 and also to add software compatilbity with Tru64 UNIX. I was also
using serveral things, ipmaq to name one, that were semi broken with
slink and a 2.2 kernel. Currently the stable release cycle seems to be
about every 14 months, which is far too long to keep up with %25 of new
hardware. I don't care to have the absolute most bleeding edge. OTO I
don't want to upgrade a server, to support new/additional hardware, to
something that is *known* to be unstable.
So we end up with a loose-loose situation...
JMO,
Ron
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