Re: Debian desktop -situation, proposals for discussion and change. Users point of view.

[lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca (Lennart Sorensen)]

On Thu, May 17, 2007 at 08:10:21AM +0200, Mgr. Peter Tuharsky wrote:
> Yes, and security upgrades never change behaviour of software and never 
> break things. That's the way it OUGHT to be. The reality has its own 
> turbulences.

I don't remember security upgrades ever breaking anything in testing.  I
am sure it must have happened at some point, but the security team
appears to take their work very very seriously.

> Well, I might have been out of luck. Maybe it hasn't been hudreds, just 
> a "full screen of" (didn't count them and wouldn't remember anyway).
> That changes nothing on assertion, that using the testing routinely is 
> not official, nor advisable way for ordinary users.

See below.

> My original intention was not, and still is not, to discuss capabilities 
> of testing.
> I want to discuss possibilities, how could the stable be more attractive 
> for ordinary user, how to make it usable on hardware 
> newer-than-3-years-old, how could the user be blessed with fresh 
> software rather than 2-years old, how to allow him to easily and 
> effectively participate on bug reporting, and how to avoid the work of 
> backporting security fixes to ancient software.

The answer to all of those is 'testing'.  That is all stuff stable is
definitely not meant to do.

> If You and several people claim they haven't met such problems with 
> testing, I can live with that. I also heard people whose experience was 
> different, and my personal one is closer to them. That's all.

All it takes is one package that has a dependancy problem to prevent
hundreds of other packages from upgrading or installing fully.  It looks
like everything is broken, when all it really is is just one missing or
broken package.  When you know how to read what the upgrade system tells
you you can usually deal with it or put the right things on hold for a
few days while the missing package makes it in to testing.

In unstable there are occationally bad packages uploaded that break
things enough that you just have to wonder if the maintainer even tried
to install it themselves. :)  Usually there will be an answer to how to
go back or fix it on the debian irc channel already.

--
Len Sorensen