On Wed, Nov 20, 2002 at 12:41:19PM -0500, Mark Mealman wrote: > Debian has always been a rock solid stable distribution. I rarely had > problems 5 years back running production servers on unstable, and when > testing came into existance the "bleeding edge" of Debian got even more > reliable. I'd place the unstable versions of Debian above any release > version of Red Hat, Mandrake or SUSE when it comes to stability and > security. > But Debian's bleeding edge really tends to lag. What's KDE up to on > testing, version 2.2? Mozilla is 1.0? Java's at 1.1? It takes a lot of time > for developers to gather the sources, compile binaries across all of > Debian's supported platforms and make sure they play nice with other > packages. If you think Debian unstable fares better on the stability and security metrics than most commercial distributions, why are you simultaneously criticizing testing for being out of date? Why not just use unstable, if you think that's sufficient? The KDE migration is a known issue, of course, and there's not much that can be done to get KDE3 packages into Debian *today* and get it right. Getting it right is important to us. Sometimes our devotion to cross-platform support hurts us on the "cutting edge" front, and it's true that users will sometimes choose a different distro because of this. I think it's asking a bit much for Debian to always meet the needs of *all* users. I don't know what you mean by "Java's at 1.1". There are many Java implementations about, and most of them aren't free enough to distribute. Which Java version are you referring to here? > And then there's the political BS that's been with the Debian scene since, > well, about forever. I really don't miss that or the occasional elitest > attitude that crops up. Last I checked no one on the Gentoo forums called > anyone who used Debian a moron. So I suppose in that respect it really is a > superior distribution. It's superior because it's less elitist? Hmm. :) -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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