Re: Debian desktop -situation, proposals for discussion and change. Users point of view.
On Tue, 15 May 2007, Mgr. Peter Tuharsky wrote:
> Yes, bugs are unavoidable. However, testing is often in situation "whole
> system broken" or "nearly useless". I see difference here; occassional
> bug in desktop app is acceptable. Whole system unreliable is not acceptable.
Have you facts to assert this?
I've been an happy user of testing. It happens that some packages are not
upgradable during a timeframe however the installed packages are not broken
and thus the system is perfectly reliable.
> >You can't just get the latest version and hope that it won't break
> >anything.
>
> That should be verified in light of broad experience (I don't have any).
> Does it happen often that GNOME version change breaks many things? The
> only my try was to put GNOME 2.0 to Debian Woody (ugly GNOME 1.2), and I
> was succesful.
You can't generalize based on a single experience like that. Your
restricted yourself to software published by the Gnome project. Check how
many applications depend on Gnome and yet are not developed following
Gnome's schedule. Those are the applications which have not been tested by
upstream with the new Gnome and which are the more likely to break.
You can't rely on upstream to do this testing for you. We have a purpose,
we don't stabilize our distribution just because it sounds nice, it's
really needed in many cases.
Don't get me wrong however, I'm all in favor of having backports
integrated in Debian and make it a viable alternative for many users.
But you simply can't drop newer upstream version in what we call "stable"
like you suggest.
We don't really need more discussion on that topic. We need improvements
to make that a realistic goal.
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog
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