Re: Upstream "stable" branches and Debian freeze
On Mon, January 31, 2011 18:09, Christian PERRIER wrote:
> However, upstream's policy in their "stable" branches is alway to only
> fix "important" bugs (they don't call them this way...but the
> definition is fairly close to Debian's). So, *in the case of samba*, I
> can guarantee that the user's (indeed sysadmin's) experience is much
> improved if (s)he can follow the upstream minor releases.
In the past such things have not been allowed with the argumentation that
even though stable may contain bugs, users rely on the behaviour that
stable has. They may know about a bug but may have worked around it (and
the update may break the workaround) or they do not know about a bug but a
fix for it may break a previously functional system. And of course as we
all know: bugfixes are not zero-risk and do have chances on new bugs being
introduced.
Being completely bug-free would be nice, but is probably unachievable. I
think there's something to say for the predictability of a release: it may
not be perfect, but once installed and tested it will keep working.
Cheers,
Thijs
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