Re: branding debian releases
On 2004-04-15, Will Trillich penned:
>
> john doe will read "stable" and might think it means that "it's got
> all the current upstream bug fixes" when what we mean by it is "we
> stopped adding new stuff to this one a long time ago, and haven't
> found any serious conflicts in quite a long time".
Let's not forget the security fixes. That new stuff does get added.
> john doe will read "unstable" and may think it means "not stable",
> whereas what we mean is "probably stable, and we're working on making
> it more stable".
Um. I think what we mean is "try this stuff and see if it breaks."
> john doe will read "testing" and may think it means "experimental"
> when we intend it to mean "whatever isn't stable here will be really
> soon, and it'll be the new stable version".
But whatever isn't stable will be stable in unstable before it's stable
in testing ...
(Say that five times fast!)
I don't think one can assert anything about the stability of the
'testing' distro. If anything, one can assert that its stability will
shift over time.
> there's a discrepancy between what a newbie it likely to infer, and
> what the old hands have learned to interpret.
And apparently, the old hands don't necessarily get it right or agree,
either.
> maybe we should avoid the descriptive names and use only
>
> ...slink ...potato woody sarge sid
>
> ?
I'd say no. If you're tracking sarge/testing, what happens when sarge
is promoted to stable? If you specify sarge, your machine tracks what
is now the stable distro; if you specify testing, your machine tracks
the new testing distro. This is an important distinction.
The whole problem here is that we're trying to assign characteristics
that just don't exist. The only definitions that exist are here:
http://www.debian.org/releases/
Unstable is where active development of Debian occurs.
Testing contains packages that haven't been accepted into a "stable"
release yet, but they are in the queue for that.
Stable contains the latest officially released distribution of Debian.
Experienced users can predict the qualities of these distributions to
varying degrees, but the fact is, the above three statements are the
only defining characteristics.
--
monique
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