Re: Some observations regardig the progress towards Debian 3.1
Scripsit Yann Dirson <ydirson@altern.org>
> But that last point raises another issue: does anyone really use
> testing ? Would anyone use pre-testing after all ?
I think very many people use stable plus bits and pieces from
testing. I have two machines set up that way. Getting the bits and
pieces from testing instead of unstable gives some amount of
protection from getting something that is horribly broken enough to
hose the entire system.
For a non-mission-critical desktop system behind a firewall, I prefer
to run testing, upgrading infrequently. I care relatively little about
the bleeding edge as such, but little bugfixes in otherwise mature
packages propagate into testing much quicker than they reach stable.
Again, not blindly tracking unstable gives me a reasonable potection
against bad packages breaking my system completely.
In fact my desktop system runs unstable, not testing. But I do not
perceive any particular benefit in that. On the contrary it makes me
dread seeing "Unpacking new libc6... oops, kernel panic" each time I
update (not that it has actually happened since I converted, mind
you). I run unstable solely by altruism; after all *somebody* has to
run unstable in order to detect such snafus before they propagate to
testing.
But if somehow I completely lost my respect for Debian's social
process (say, if my NM application gets rejected with rude words and
insults and somebody adds a script to the BTS that automatically tags
all my wishlist bugs wontfix and closes them, and the consensus on
debian-devel is that both are completely reasonable actions), then I
would waste no time in selfishly going back to testing instead of
unstable.
--
Henning Makholm "I didn't even know you *could* kill chocolate ice-cream!"
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