Re: Woody Progress

[Erik Steffl <steffl@bigfoot.com>]

"Charl P. Botha" wrote:
> 
> On Sun, Dec 03, 2000 at 02:04:08PM -0800, Erik Steffl wrote:
> >   if your server is not a production server (mission critical, whatever
> > that means to you), I think you can run unstable with no big worries. I
> > am running unstable and there were VERY few problems, I'd say less then
> > with stable releases of some other distros.
> 
> I disagree.  When I setup a workstation and I choose stable, the advantage
> that I get is setup-once-and-forget.  Well, except for the occasional
> apt-get upgrade from security.debian.org, but that's precisely one of the
> conveniences of stable.  You know that your system is primarily constant,
> and you only have to check security.d.o once in a while to make sure that
> you're relatively secure.
> 
> With unstable however, security fixes might come out, and you'll miss these
> if you don't apt-get upgrade to the latest woody regularly.  Doing this
> however is also risky, as you tend to experience the bugs that do come out
> in the development.  If you don't apt-get upgrade, you risk having a
> terribly insecure system.

  that's what I meant, unstable with constant apt-get update && apt-get
dist-upgrade is quite stable, I had not have any major problems and I've
been using it that way since potato was unstable (IIRC).

  minor problem was glibc update, some apps had to be restarted, most of
the services were restarted automatically but perhaps some had to be
restarted manually, not a big deal really,

  another problem (probably the most serious one) was the X upgrade, it
did not automatically upgrade the X server itself, that had to be
'apt-get install'-ed explicitly, that took me some time to figure out.

> Don't get me wrong, I run woody at home and enjoy it immensely.  At work I
> run potato however, as I'm not running linux for the sake of linux, but
> actually to get real work done.

  [BTW: that's an intereting concept:-)]

  yes, but in such a situation you don't want to run latest release of
e.g. redhat, right? that was my point.

  I wasn't advocating using unstable everywhere, I was saying that
stable/unstable  is roughly equivalent of previous/latest in lot of
other distros (I mostly hear problems with lates releases by redhat, but
AFAIK corel is not exactly most mature release, mandrake had quite a few
problems with 7.1 etc...).

	erik