> > I too have run testing in a production environment in the past > > without problems but I now believe there is a better way. > > I've been using testing on my personal desktop for several years now, > constantly upgrading, and it works very well. that's exactly what i want to avoid- constantly upgrading. it's a big hassle. doing it regularly on 20+ machines is a major pain- especially if you want to keep the environment consistant on all the machines. some people don't have the bandwidth to be constantly upgrading. for my personal machines, i've been running debian testing, but for a production environment, i want my weekly "apt-get update && apt-get -u dist-upgrade" to pull in a very small set of minor changes, even if that means older software. i think this is a common misconception with the stable/testing/unstable release names. there's more to debian's stable release than stable software- it's a stable release of a whole set of software, on a set of hardware platforms. the key point being: it just doesn't change much. there's a small set of security updates that you need to download every so often. an individual piece of software may in fact be less stable, but it's usually a known instability- which may or may not be what you're looking for. i've explained this to people many times, and they often seem to understand, and then seem to forget it a week later... *sigh* > > To me it is a much cleaner solution than running a mixed > > stable/testing/unstable box and all the associated pinning hoohah > > and makes troubleshooting a deal easier too. > > I just make sure I only have stable and testing in > /etc/apt/sources.list. Also I never upgrade all packages > (dist-upgrade) until a new stable distribution comes out. I just > "apt-get install" individual things that I want from testing. again, this is exactly the kind of thing i want to avoid- in my opinion, perhaps the best feature of debian(stable) is "apt-get dist-upgrade" and being quite certain that very little will go wrong. > "stable" with many backports will be less tested, and possibly more > unstable than "testing". i largely agree with this, though if the type of stablility you're looking for is "i don't want to have to download 100MB of updates every week to keep current", the backports approach may work better- depends on how many and exactly which backports you need. freegeek has been using a stable woody based release (the "Freekbox 2") geared to inexperienced users since summer of 2002. with a backport of openoffice 1.0.x, the only non-security related update in 2 years was when the backport moved from 1.0.1 to 1.0.3, and it's still a quite useable system (though is showing signs of aging). live well, vagrant
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