Re: Why is Debian lagging so much behind Slackware?

[Alan Shutko <ats@acm.org>]

"Keith G. Murphy" <keithmur@mindspring.com> writes:

> No, I honestly don't think it's that at all.  The problem is, once you
> let the package maintainers update stable on the fly with bug fixes, how
> do you ensure they don't break something major (which may not even be
> the package itself in isolation, but interaction with others)?

OTOH, it would seem to be feasible to update and test packages which
are leafs on the dependency tree.  How would they affect packages
which don't depend on them?  

For example, it would seem reasonable to upgrade Gnus, nethack or sl,
which don't seem to have any other packages depending on them.[1] It
might be feasible to upgrade Emacs, since you would have a limited
number of packages to check.  It would be very difficult to upgrade
libc.

This would seem to allow the updating of many desktop-type apps (as
long as they worked with the existing version of the libraries they
depend on).

Footnotes: 
[1]  Is there a way to check that, I wonder?

-- 
Alan Shutko <ats@acm.org> - In a variety of flavors!
I'm a Hollywood writer; so I put on a sports jacket and take off my brain.