Need Info About Debian Versions: [Was:: Some Info]

[Kent West <westk@acu.edu>]

Umar Draz wrote:

> hi dear members
>  
>   i am new in Debian. and use woody. and alos new in debian-user list. 
> i have seen lot of mails and i see about unstalbe, sid,
>  
> plz tell what is (unstable, sid) is it is SID a version of debian.
>  
> and what is the mean of unstalbe ,  stable
>  
>  is it unstable is a version of debian and
>  is it stable version of debian
>
> <http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html>


http://www.debian.org/releases/

stable is the officially released version. It's what you'd buy in the 
store if Debian were sold commercially.

testing is the next version to be released. It changes often, as new 
packages are added in, or bug fixes are made, or (unknown) bugs are 
added in, etc. This version has the advantage of having mostly new 
versions of software, and is fairly static (compared to unstable), and 
has mostly working packages. It has the disadvantage that if a buggy 
package does make it to testing, it tends to take a couple of weeks 
before a new one comes in to fix the package. This also makes security 
problems longer-lived for those running testing.

unstable is where the developers play. It changes very often, and tends 
to have lots of flux on a daily basis. You'll see more brokenness in 
packages here as opposed to testing, but that same brokenness usually 
gets fixed faster, as in hours or a few days as opposed to several weeks.

Most folks run stable on their servers, where reliability is of concern, 
and a lot of people run testing or unstable on their workstations where 
newer versions of software are of concern. I run unstable on all my 
workstations, and have only been seriously bit once (a PAM problem that 
caused the inability to log in, which meant it was difficult to fix the 
problem (since you couldn't log in to fix the problem)).


P.S. Since spam has become such a huge problem, a lot of people won't 
ever see an email with a subject like what you started out with because 
their spam filters will filter them out. And even without the spam 
issues, a lot of readers won't bother reading your posts if the subject 
is not informative. Thus I made the change.

--
Kent