Re: Woody vs. Sarge vs. You've heard this before ;-)
"Jacob Anawalt" <jacob@cachevalley.com> writes:
>> I was under the impression that the progression from "most reliable"
>> to "most chaotic" was Stable -> Testing -> Unstable. Is that not so?
>
> So was I. It is not so (or so I've been told and my experiance backs
> this up.) Unstable has been fine for my desktop for over a month
> now.
(Note that it has been known to break, and quite dramatically. Just
because it's been good recently doesn't mean that there isn't going to
be a random catastrophic failure in the future. :-)
> The fact that I hear it said so much re-confirms to me that the labels
> testing and unstable (unless you like adventure) and possibly the
> writeup on the debian site lead the masses to expect something
> different than what they get.
Testing is still a comparatively young concept for Debian. For the
woody release, it seemed to work fairly well. At this point, the
canonical problem we've run into looks something like this: package A
depends on package base (= 1). Base is upgraded to version 2.
Packages B through Z update and now require base (>= 2), but A
doesn't. The way the testing rules work, base can't be updated, since
that would break A's dependency, but that means that none of B through
Z can be updated either. The solutions are either "wait forever" or
"intentionally break A", and the testing czars have gone with the
latter option as of late, with the result that testing is closer to
current but not necessarily useful on its own.
--
David Maze dmaze@debian.org http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal."
-- Abra Mitchell
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