Re: No KDE/GNOME for stable?
On Sat, 24 Jul 1999, Carl Fink wrote:
> It seems to me that there's no way to install either KDE or GNOME
> using the current stable release. Apparently once a release is
> "frozen" all new versions of .deb archives are created for unstable,
> which in this case means using glibc 2.1 . . . which means that you
> can't actually use them on a stable machine, because there's no
> approved way of upgrading to glibc 2.1 on stable that I can locate.
You can use them on a stable machine. As others have written, some people
have built slink debs of the latest Gnome and KDE.
And if they hadn't, you could still always compile from source.
> . . . why? What's the purpose of making everything on machines
> running stable un-upgradable until some obscure Perl bug is worked
> out? I just don't follow.
Stable is just that: a distribution where everything is in a known state,
where you can install the system and be reasonably sure all the software
will work and will work together without horrible conflicts. If you
install a stable system, nothing should have any major bugs that will keep
you from using the system. The only sure way to do this is to use software
that has been tried and tested together with all the other software in
the distro.
Unstable is also just that: it's a distribution with the latest and
greatest software. The latest and greatest often has bugs to work out, for
example the perl thing that's been causing so much trouble (yesterday
there were only 3 packages i wanted that weren't fixed, so i built them
from source with 'fixed' dependancies). But even though potato was
severely borken for a while, anyone could come along and use slink without
those problems.
That's the choice Debian offers: a rock-solid system with _slightly_
out-of-date software (although you're free to upgrade it), or a
state-of-the-art system with all the bugs inherent in the bleeding edge.
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