Re: Question re Debian versions
On 2004-03-19, Michael Satterwhite penned:
>
> On Thursday 18 March 2004 17:31, Brian Nelson wrote:
>>
>> However, testing tends to be more broken than unstable. Testing
>> works well right now since we're near a release and almost everything
>> in there is in a releasable state, but after sarge releases, watch
>> out.
>
> I'm sure I'm missing something here. I would expect that the Testing
> version becomes more unstable after the current Sid becomes the
> Testing version (which is why I wouldn't update from Sarge to ??? for
> a few months). But are you *REALLY* saying that the new Testing
> version will be more unstable than the new Unstable version??
> Something seems wrong with that picture.
I'm not sure that "less stable" is the right term, but "less usable"
almost certainly is.
What I was trying to get across in my earlier post was exactly what
Brian just said.
Unstable is where bug fixes, new packages, etc are first introduced into
a debian distribution. (There's also something called "experimental,"
but that's not a proper distribution.)
Testing is really "candidate distribution for promotion to stable."
Let me give an example that hopefully will make things more clear than
what I just typed.
Say you have package A that makes it past unstable and into testing.
Then someone finds a bug in package A. It turns out to be an icky bug,
and it takes quite a while to fix it. The bug will be fixed in unstable
before trickling down into testing.
Also, look at security updates. Updates are provided for stable and
unstable almost immediately. Then those using testing distributions
must wait the allotted amount of time before receiving the unstable
update in testing.
It is true that packages go from experimental (not a distribution) to
unstable to testing to stable.
It is not true that stability/usability increases as you go from
unstable to testing to stable.
--
monique
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