Lex Hider wrote:
On Sun, 28 Nov 2004 03:49 am, Andrew Suffield wrote:On Sat, Nov 27, 2004 at 11:15:26PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
Not changing does actually mean it's reliable -- you can rely on doing the same thing today as it did yesterday.
Yes, very clever, you've successfully conflated the terminology. He was obviously referring to 'no/low serious bugs', as distinct from 'stable'.
There's a reason people think relate 'no/low serious bugs' and 'stable'. One part is that stable really does have less serious bugs than testing and unstable -- from security bugs to RC bugs in general. But the other important part is the update factor -- you can rely on the "serious" bugs in stable to be the same from one day to the next. It would be nicer if you could rely on them being fixed; but being able to rely on no new bugs being introduced is the next best thing. And for comparing stable and testing, the update factor is generally the more serious issue.
My main point is the variability of the reliability of the packages in testing or unstable with respect to time.
Some examples of when testing/unstable were broken or when major packages [gnome, kde, perl] were inconsistent [probably need a better word I can't think of right now]. i.e. not all at the same version. When transitions are happening and half of the old and half of the new versions are in the archive.
So in a nutshell, my concern is: A) testing/unstable will be broken and some stage.
stable's broken too -- tilp 5.03-1 fails to purge because of a bad interaction between "echo" and debconf apparently, eg; but (almost) any working installation of woody made on 2002/08/01 is still behaving the same today as it was then; while an installation of sarge made at the same time has undergone any number of significant changes that have probably subjectively broken it at some point.
Cheers, aj
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