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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users



Hi, Ben:

On Thursday 22 July 2010 08:09:44 Ben Finney wrote:
> Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes:
> > This one [claim of Debian's libraries being out-of-date] always
> > boggles me and makes me wonder if we should present Debian unstable or
> > testing as the "typical" installation. Debian testing (and often
> > Debian unstable) is more stable than the distributions with equivalent
> > up-to-date libraries, and those distributions generally never offer
> > anything remotely like Debian stable. (RHEL is considerably more
> > unstable than Debian stable *and* has even older software, for
> > example.)
>
> Which of the above uses of “stable” refers to stability (“slow rate of
> change”), and which refers to reliability (“high likelihood of working
> when needed”)? Too many conversations conflate the two, and in this case
> I think the distinction is important.

Why?

With my user hat on the only stability I care of is "it ain't break".  When a 
system breaks it makes no distintion if it's because a not so well managed 
upgrade, an app bug or an interaction problem among different packages.  In 
fact, system-wide, an upgrade failure is nothing but another bug.


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