Re: Debian: abandon ship?
Oleg <oleg@tw304h3.cpmc.columbia.edu> writes:
> On Wednesday 05 June 2002 01:57 pm, Jeronimo Pellegrini wrote:
>> > How does FreeBSD manage to stay reasonably secure and stable, yet modern
>> > (compared to Potato)?
>>
>> I think it's because they don't have a "zero-bugs" release policy like
>> Debian. The base system is stable. The stuff in the ports tree is not, from
>> my experience. I once decided to install gdm on a FreeBSD box... There were
>> *lots* of broken dependencies in the ports tree, and I had to vgrep
>> the missing dependencies in the compile logs. :-/
>
> I'm not advocating FreeBSD. In fact, I tried it a couple of times, ran it for
> a week or two and hated it for a variety of reasons. Debian is the only
> OS/Distribution that I ever liked (which is no surprise, of course)
>
> I just wanted to say that maybe changes to "stable" should be more
> incremental. E.g., once it's determined that KDE2 is secure and stable, why
> not add it? We all know that the situation with KDE was easily remedied by
> adding extra lines to sources.list, but not with other great programs that
> never made it into Potato. Why should users risk remote root if all they
> want is some desktop software?
I agree. I think stable should be able to get more fixes and updates
than just security fixes. It's well known that much of the software in
stable is quite buggy and years behind the upstream source (Mozilla M18,
for example) but cannot be fixed until a security hole is found in that
software. I think regular points releases, every month or two,
containing new software and updates to older software, would be great.
No major changes would be permitted of course, but there's no reason
most desktop software couldn't be updated in stable.
If other users believe that their software shouldn't be updated unless
absolutely necessary, then it should be possible to only upgrade
packages that have security advisories.
--
Brian Nelson <nelson@bignachos.com>
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org
Reply to: