Mark Roach wrote:
I think that two years is a perfectly reasonable amount of time between stable versions.
From a software-engineering perspective, I agree in principle. But when it comes to Linux, the pace of development outstrips this principle in practice. Two years is at least 2 lifetimes in the Linux world.
I think that the difference in opinion is the difference between "enthusiasts" who enjoy constantly upgrading to the bleeding edge and admins who want a stable and consistent platform across their systems. I definitely fall under the enthusiast category for my home system, but for the systems I admin that have to continue to work, even 6 months istoo frequent for large upgrades.
I'm in between. My problem -- I guess this is the consensus of the replies: that's it's just *my* problem -- is that I want to focus on one (1) distro, and so I want something that I don't have to upgrade every 6 months, or even a year, but something that I can stay current with if I think it's worth it to actually do the upgrade.
The current system caters to both groups in my opinion. If you desire the latest and greatest of all or most software packages, you probably wouldn't be using stable even if it was only three months old, am I right? I know many people started complaining about the lack of X 4.2 and KDE 3.1 packages after only a couple of weeks. I guess my question is does "stable" really matter to you? If so, why?
Yes it does. A lot. I upgraded my workstation to "unstable" *twice* and uninstalled it both times because I couldn't stand that some things were broken. "Yeah, well that's what you get for running unstable." True, but that's also the only way I can get the new features of KDE, which, it may be said, I don't *have* to have, but I *like* them.
Let's take a concrete example. I have a Palm Tungsten. Now, someone else in another thread already gave me the, "Oh you poor baby; you're new toy doesn't work." Thanks. Lotta help there, buddy. This sort of jealousy will turn off those with thinner skins. To get this to work, I need a 2.4.20 or later kernel. Since I am unwilling to live in unstable, I tried testing. But not even testing has precompiled kernels for SMP machines. Plus, it has the added bonus of NOT HAVING THE SOURCE EITHER. So I downloaded the raw sources, but I suck at compiling kernels. (Throughout the 8 years I've used Linux, my success rate probably stands at 30%.) So now I have a testing system that STILL can't do what I need it to do. My fault? Yeah. But I don't have this problem with any other distro. Maybe there's more kernel stuff I could pull in from sid, but that's just asking for trouble. Which brings me to...
Someone else was saying that they loved Debian for the "ease of administration." Er, right. For years, I've heard how great apt was. Now that I've subjected myself to it for a couple weeks, I can honestly say that I don't get it. It's NOT just about `apt-get dist-upgrade'. Which, by the way, didn't complete correctly for me going from stable to testing, and I see other posts on this list that say the same thing. So while this may or may not be a great thing, there's still how to configure the packages after they're installed or upgraded. I personally *like* how Debian gets out of your way and leaves you to admin your system in the way that the package authors intended, but this is NOT an *easy* way to admin the system. Red Hat and SuSE (I've not tried Mandrake enough to comment on it) both have done some really great work here 1) making reasonable assumptions about what you're likely to do with the system and 2) making some nice front-ends for the basics.
I'm "typing" into the wind here. It's helping me, if nothing else, to settle my thinking about the whole business. I'm going to install SuSE on my servers and see how I like that for a few weeks. I think the bottom line is that if SuSE pulls a Red Hat, and seriously changes the terms of their releases, I'll just go to Gentoo, where I can get all the pick-and-choose of what I want to run, plus the ability to run the latest and greatest if that's what I settle on. Yeah, I have to wait for it to compile, but I guess I can live with that for the opportunity to run at any level of software I determine. The Gentoo folks have recently introduced a "testing" branch in their system as well. Sure, they're just wrapping original sources with some patches and a build script, but really, that's all Debian is doing as well. I'm not convinced that Debian's "quality" is any better than any other system that's two years old. Red Hat 7.3 was a fantastic system, and perfectly solid for me. That's about the level of the software in stable these days. So I don't understand it when people say that "stable" is stable because it's been hacked on by the Debian maintainers. Yeah, I guess that's partly true, but I think what's taking so long is this dogged determination for the distro to run on everything from HP's and Sun's to PDA's, and for it to all be committed en masse. That appeals to the idealist in me, but it's looking like my inner idealist isn't as big as the average Debian user's. ;-)
Regards, dk