Re: branding debian releases
On Wed, Apr 14, 2004 at 11:22:22AM -0400, Chris Metzler wrote:
> On Wed, 14 Apr 2004 07:59:49 -0600
> "Monique Y. Mudama" <spam@bounceswoosh.org> wrote:
> >
> > My understanding of the 'testing' distribution is in conflict with your
> > description. Testing is the last to receive security updates, and I
> > believe it is more prone to wide-ranging package bugs than is unstable.
> > I see it more as a developer sandbox than a live distribution.
> >
> > Am I wrong?
>
> No, you're quite correct; and it's a point that's missing from most
> of this discussion. Testing is a box into which the components of
> the next release are being collected; at any given time, some of the
> components -- even ones which will be vital to the release -- may
> not be present at all, or may not be useful because of problems
> (security bugs) where the fixed component is still being tested
> (is still in unstable and hasn't made it down to testing yet).
> This is less true as we get close to release; but in the middle
> of the release cycle, it's quite common. All one has to do is
> search the archives of this list to find many many posts asking
> why GNOME in testing doesn't work right, why KDE in testing is
> completely unusable at all, etc.; followed by the usual explanations
> of what testing is.
I concur totally. I think that this point could really do
with some explanation on http://www.debian.org/releases [1] and
http://www.debian.org/releases/sarge/ [2] which if anything, perpetuate
the myth that testing is more stable than unstable. I think the only
good reason to run testing is if you are willing to help find problems
in a potential release.
A
[1] testing: The testing distribution contains packages that haven't
been accepted into a stable release yet, but they are in the queue for
that. The main advantage of using this distribution is that it has more
recent versions of software, and the main disadvantage is that it's not
completely tested and has no official support from Debian security team.
unstable: The unstable distribution is where active development of
Debian occurs. Generally, this distribution is run by developers and
those who like to live on the edge.
[2] This release started as a copy of woody, and is currently in a state
called testing. That means that things should not break as bad as in
unstable or experimental distributions, because packages are allowed to
enter this distribution only after a certain period of time has passed,
and when they don't have any release-critical bugs filed against them.
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