Re: On Sid and Experimental
On Sun, 2 Oct 2011, Manjul Apratim wrote:
Therefore, from
purely a user's perspective, I wonder about the daunting task of maintaining
Testing/Sid/Experimental separately - with due respect, if Sid was itself
Experimental, and Testing the stabler version of that (but < Stable) which
would eventually mature into the next release, would that have been an
inadequate scenario?
The problem, as I see it, is that you are looking on the four
distributions as they would be delivered to you while debian as a project
sees them as parts of the release system. Unstable, Testing and Stable
form a chain that makes up the very foundation of the next Stable release.
When you forget that part and the logic behind them I can totally
understand why one would like to see Unstable as more true to the name
than it is today. On the other hand; quality and usability is as important
as new "upgraded" versions of the software. Not everyone was overly
pleased with the introduction of KDE 4 series when that happened. Ask
Canonical about the "upgrade" to Unity in Ubuntu 11.04 - I am sure not
everyone was pleased with that either.
Currently, if I wish to use software from Experimental,
I would have to resort to apt-pinning, and I (personally of course) find
that to be almost as dangerous as running Sid or using the actual software
from Experimental itself; even as Monsieur Hertzog himself states in his
blog, "apt-pinning for the brave" - I cannot help but view too many apt pins
as an intentional recipe for disaster!
Apt-pinning or installing things the old fashioned way by building from
source are more or less equallly bad in that sense, but we enable you to
do so. That's the nice thing about the universal operating system.
--
/brother
http://martin.bagge.nu
Bruce Schneier decrypted the Bible. The plaintext read, "Bruce Schneier".
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