Re: etch's upgrades during life cycle
On Thu, Jan 04, 2007 at 11:00:16AM +0000, Paul Waring wrote:
> I think the problem that many people find with Debian is that they do
> want the stability and security of stable, but at the same time they
> don't want to be a dozen releases behind upstream. I've seen many
> occasions where there's been a new release with useful features that has
> been available in upstream for months and it's still not in Debian
> stable, even though it is available in the package repositories of other
> Linux distributions. It's not so much a case of wanting to be on the
> bleeding edge for most people, but more that we don't want to still be
> powering our machines with crank handles when everyone else has moved on
> to electricity.
backports.org is, to my mind, a perfect solution to this problem; it
allows you to selectively upgrade your favourite/important packages that
you need, whilst retaining the stable base on which to run them.
One proviso I would add to that is that it's only good so long as it
doesn't move too much focus away from Debian's own stable releases. I
can't see any evidence of that at present. It's also possibly the case
that backports.org could/should made more official or at least offically
recommended by Debian, although I understand why this isn't necessarily
the case right now.
However, the original question was about hardware support, which is a
rather special case. I've spent many frustrated hours getting Debian
stable onto modern hardware using various tricks and hacks, and I'm sure
anyone running Debian extensively in production has had similar
experiences. This is one area where an official updated installer and
kernel would greatly improve life, and I'm very interested by Moritz's
comment that this is planned for etch.
Cheers,
Dominic.
--
Dominic Hargreaves | http://www.larted.org.uk/~dom/
PGP key 5178E2A5 from the.earth.li (keyserver,web,email)
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