Re: Lost Trust
On Mon, May 31, 2004 at 03:45:44PM +1000, Andrew Pollock wrote:
> On Sun, May 30, 2004 at 11:31:45PM -0500, Ed wrote:
> > I'm a recent convert to debian at home and I was considering switching
> > to it for development at work. I've been tracking sarge weeklies with
> > jigdo and lost my network device when the tg3 network driver was
> > removed without warning.
> >
If it's any consolation - I _do_ run testing at work for development.
On reasonable hardware, it's fine. Don't let this put you off.
> > I have to say I'm very disappointed. I had this implicit trust that
> > releases would get progressively better. On my part, I would test
> > them and if anything broke, I would help debug it.
> >
The releases _are_ getting better. Debian installer now works, for
example, for high values of works :)
> > I never would have guessed that my working system would have been
> > intentionally broken.
> >
> > The lists don't offer any consolation - I now see it was deleted because
> > a patch to fix broken hardware was not offered in source form. Right.
> >
Right. Don't blame the Debian developer. If we can't patch it properly,
we can't fix it and know it's fixed within the Debian framework. You may
be able to get a non-free driver. The non-free archive is _not_ part of
Debian and has no guarantee - at least in part because of things like
this. If the driver breaks again, say at the release of kernel 2.7,
would we be able to fix it again? Who knows?
> > Do I have to read every changelog.Debian before accepting package
> > upgrades? Is there any reason I should trust debian again?
>
> Umm, in a word, yes, you probably should at least eyeball the changelogs for
> significant parts of your system to avoid nasty surprises. Keeping half an
> eye on -devel would also help. You're testing a pre-release version of the
> OS here. I think you'd be justified in your stance if woody had tg3
> support, and you did a dist-upgrade to sarge once it had been released
> (after reading the release notes) and your tg3 support disappeared without
> warning.
Seconded - you should be reading debian-devel at least. Traffic is high
but you'll hear about stuff like this.
>
> Stick at it, it's fun, but you need to participate fully if you don't want
> to get nasty surprises.
Nasty surprises are rare :) Having said that, I'd appreciate any news
of a working 802.11g PCI wireless card which doesn't use
atheros/broadcom drivers myself :( [Bought a Netgear card thinking they
were always well supported - potentially big mistake :( ]
All the best,
Andy
>
> regards
>
> Andrew
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