Re: unstable is "unstable"; stable is "outdated"
On 1 Feb 2002, Jeff S Wheeler wrote:
> On Fri, 2002-02-01 at 01:42, Jason Lim wrote:
> > We have production boxes running unstable with no problem. Needed to run
> > unstable because only unstable had some new software, unavailable in
> > stable. Its a pity stable gets so outdated all the time as compared to
> > other distros like Redhat and Caldera (stable still on 2.2 kernel), but
> > thats a topic for a separate discussion.
>
> This is really a shame. It's my biggest complaint with Debian by far.
> The tools work very well, but the release cycle is such that you can't
> use a "stable" revision of the distribution and have modern packages
> available.
Some up-to-date packages are located in the "testing" distribution.
This probably has been (and currently) discussed elsewhere. I think the
problems are that there are too many packages and too many dependencies.
Maybe a solution would be to have a fourth collection (beside stable,
testing and unstable): "mini". It would not have thousands of packages.
For example, it would only have about 150 to 300 packages. Only new
packages are added if a vote approves.
The mini collection can be done similar to the testing distribution: The
mini distribution can be automatically-generated from the unstable
distribution by a set of scripts which attempt to move over packages which
lack important bugs and don't have dependency conflicts.
Look here for ideas: http://people.debian.org/~jules/testingfaq.html
What do you think of having a mini distribution that limits the number of
packages allowed?
> I can't imagine this issue is being ignored, but is it discussed on a
> policy list, probably? It seems like FreeBSD's -RELEASE, -STABLE,
> -CURRENT scheme works much better than what Debian has. I've never seen
One difference is that FreeBSD's ports collection is different than their
base collection. The base (or main) collection has the -stable and
-current development branches. But the ports collection is only developed
in one: -current. (FreeBSD builds packages for -current and recent
releases, but they only use one, the current, ports collection. Because of
this, some consider the -current ports collection to be like "unstable".)
Jeremy C. Reed
p.s. I am writing an article about the BSD ports collections, in regards
to *stable* ports collections. If you are interested in reviewing a rough
draft, let me know off-list.
Reply to: