Re: stable vs. testing: same versions, different status

["Michael S. Gilbert" <michael.s.gilbert@gmail.com>]

On Fri, 3 Jul 2009 22:52:35 +0200 Francesco Poli wrote:
>> the issue is not necessarily manpower itself, but rather the value of
>> volunteers' time.  it makes little sense to duplicate work for testing
>> and unstable when unstable will eventually overwrite testing.
>
> The same reasoning (on a larger scale) could be applied to stable and
> would lead to the conclusion that security updates make little sense,
> since a new stable release will eventually replace the current stable on
> end-users' boxes (e.g.: etch replaced sarge, lenny replaced etch, and
> so forth).
> 
> I am not convinced that this would be a reasonable conclusion...

this line of reasoning is a converse accident logical fallacy [1].
stable security support is not testing security support (they are both
separate special cases of a logical concept "security support"), so the
same rules/philosophy should not apply to both.

mike

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Converse_accident