Re: testing currently unusable ?
On Sunday 27 July 2003 12:58, Björn Stenberg wrote:
> [snip] If debian is only useful for people who
> can either 1) run unstable, or 2) backport all applications they
> need, then we fail our social contract.
>
> Just because you and I may be comfortable running unstable or mixed
> enviroments does not mean this is not a problem for a large number of
> users.
>
> Then what what should they do? Debian currently has nothing to offer
> non-developers who want to run linux on their desktop. Stable is so
> out of date as to be virtually useless for desktop use.
Agreed. As an end-user myself, I'm not interested in running anything
except stable. I'm not a developer and never will be - for me, software is
a means to an end, not an end in itself.
The ability to just do apt-get update/upgrade to keep the machine
secure is Debian's biggest strength.
The moment you start mixing in testing or unstable, this breaks,
because before you know it the damn thing is installing a bleeding-edge libc6
when you least expect it and you're very soon into rpm-style dependency hell.
And there's no security support.
The only way for a non-developer to run up-to-date desktop applications
on stable is to use unofficial packages, such as the Woody KDE-3.1.2 packages
available from download.kde.org. The same applies to other important desktop
apps, such as OpenOffice and Mozilla.
For me, the ability to find unofficial, up-to-date .debs at www.apt-get.org
has been vital. Without these packages, Debian would be useless for me.
Debian is producing a perfectly good stable desktop OS, IMHO. It just isn't
producing the apps to run on it. I have to get these somewhere else.
The underlying problem is the inflexibility of the release system. Debian
needs a more fine-grained concept of what 'stable' means. The present policy
makes sense for the OS, but it seems too restrictive for apps that sit on
top of the OS and don't have stuff dependent on them.
--
Richard Lamont
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