If unstable/testing isn't even close to the packages being used in the wild, then that pretty much validates my point that the Debian archives can be pretty stale.Mark Mealman wrote: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?I'm missing something here... what does the term "bleeding edge" have to do with testing? Unstable + experimental + packages downloaded from developers' web pages (many of which are apt-gettable) is the "bleeding edge" of Debian. Testing isn't even close.
In fact if you polled around for the biggest complaint about Debian I think you'd see "out of date" as the winner.
Although in my experience the above isn't true with smaller apps. Debian is often first on the scene with security updates as well. It's the larger more complicated packages that lag.
It's not about "better" it's about the differences. Debian has stability, but the very nature of how it achieves stability means it really lags behind other distributions when it comes packages like KDE.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.True, but are you suggesting that Gentoo is "better" because they don't bother making sure that things play nice with each other? I think that's one of Debian's strongest points.
Gentoo on the other hand uses a build system that allows for rapid deployment(KDE 3.1 final is in Gentoo and I don't think 3.1 has even been officially announced yet), but it won't ever achieve Debian's stability.
-Mark