Re: Grades of stable-ness [was: GNOME --> potato: let's do it!]
James Mastros <james@rtweb.net> writes:
> Ditto, along with disclaimer: just-a-user,-not-(yet)-a-developer....
> Might I raise the suggestion that the fact that there is an issue of staging
> areas at all means that we need to move to a three-level system:
> a. unstable -- Breakage Will Occur. Don't run unless you are prepared to
> restore from backup and possibly have your computer catch fire and/or have
> your monitor explode. Hard hat required by OSHA regulations.
> b. semi-stable -- We think it will work, but we make no guarantees (yes,
> Virginia, even less then normal with the GPL-et-all). Should be at least
> as solid as good crusty bread. Might well contain annoying, but not
> dangerous, bugs.
> c. stable -- we belive this to be as solid as granite. (And being in DC
> today, you'd be amazed how well the stuff holds up to 175 (or so) years
> of wear-and-tear.)
I agree strongly. I'm not a Debian developer either, but I am an
experienced developer overall who has submitted many bug reports and
patches to Debian for a variety of different packages. I use my
Debian box for most of my day-to-day work but am also happy to try
out new things, hunt down bugs in the source code, and fix or at
least report them.
If people like me only used stable software, fewer bugs would be found
and quality and development would suffer.
If, on the other hand, unstable starts getting lots of software that
breaks working systems, I won't be able to continue using it. Yes, I
can take the time to repair a system or restore from a backup once in
a while. But I don't have the time to do this frequently.
So, a semi-stable repository would be great for people like me. Of
course, it would also be great if apt and dselect let you easily
pick some packages from stable and others from unstable: I'm more
interested in trying out some packages than others.
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