On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 07:03:00PM -0500, John Goerzen wrote: > Hi folks, > > I'm trying to solicit comments on what people are using for development > environments and how well it's working. Here are some situations I > imagine are common: > > 1. workstation running sid > > I've followed this model for over a decade. It works well, in general, > and I keep up with development well enough that I can fix problems when > they arise. However, it tends to lead to a certain amount of cruft over > the years. Moreover, it's not really appropriate for a laptop or a > situation in which Internet access isn't readily available to fix > problems. I'm hoping to move away from that model. I've been in this situation ever since I upgraded from potato to woody back in late 2000, right before I became a Debian Developer. I've continued this practice on my work laptops that I often have to take to customers to work -- so they have to work reliably for me. There've been cases where sid has been broken when I needed the laptop for work, but these have been rare; and in the nine years that I've now used it, I can count only two times when it had an impact on my work: yaboot once broke, refusing to boot the laptop, and of course I only noticed when I was off-site, away from rescue CD's and had to use it to give a presentation. This was then done without slides, obviously. The other time was with the XFree->Xorg transition, when my X server wouldn't work for a few days and I had to use the laptop at a customer's site to configure something on their network. It was a little awkward to have to explain why I didn't have a graphical user interface, but I still could do my work, so it wasn't a problem as such. Of course, sid does require you to do a little more hand-holding, and this can be annoying at times. But if you stay up-to-date with things, I find that it's not usually a problem. I do /not/ run sid on my secondary systems, because while I don't mind having to do a bit more work to keep my primary system up-to-date, I do mind having to repeat that for other systems. So these usually run stable or testing, depending on the case. My previous laptop was a powerbook, so I still occasionally use it for some powerpc testing. However, building packages on that machine takes more effort, because it's running testing; I feel that using chroots, either through pbuilder or directly, or doing things like virtual machines, is quite a burden, and that it interferes with my workflow. When using one of my secondary machines, I'm therefore usually not as productive as when using my primary one. I guess what I'm trying to say is that while I understand the motivation of many developers to run testing or stable on their machine, running sid instead does have some important advantages for Debian Developers, while the disadvantages are not as serious as they would seem at first sight. Of course, this all depends on how much time you're willing to put into building/testing packages on the one hand, and maintaining your primary system on the other. To me, the balance is in favour of running sid, but of course YMMV. -- The biometric identification system at the gates of the CIA headquarters works because there's a guard with a large gun making sure no one is trying to fool the system. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/01/biometrics.html
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