Re: Where is Debian going?
On Thu, Jul 11, 2002 at 12:41:29PM -0500, Alex Malinovich wrote:
> I think the current naming scheme for Debian is quite clear. We have
> Debian 2.2 (Potato). Redmond has DOS 7.0 (aka Windows 95) (Chicago). The
> only tags that I think should be revised are, as was mentioned before,
> stable, testing, and unstable. Unstable especially is very scary
> sounding to most users. Yet most Linux users using other distros (like
> RH, Mandrake, etc) are using the same packages that we're using in Sid.
I do think that unstable *should* be scary-sounding. It's not so much
that the underlying software is unstable, but that the packaging itself
is potentially unstable.
Take for instance the fact that 'dselect update' currently doesn't work
in unstable, or the libpam-modules bug last year that prevented you from
logging in even as root, or the lsbdev bug a couple of months ago that
could rm -rf your system on purge because bind mounts weren't removed
properly, or ... Not to mention that packages are frequently
uninstallable due to library conflicts or transitions, and you wind up
with a system that's quite likely to require small tweaks from time to
time.
All of these are relatively easy to deal with if you know how and follow
the mailing lists, but I've seen way too many people getting bitten by
these kinds of things who didn't know how to escape. I think it's
absolutely right for Debian to discourage the casual use of unstable
until people are very comfortable with the toolset; if nothing else, it
keeps the support load down to a somewhat manageable level.
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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