Re: Debian has turned unusable.
"Freivald, Joseph A, GVSOL" <jfreivald@att.com> writes:
> Hello,
>
> I'm new to the Debian community, but I have used RedHat for about 8
> years, and Gentoo for almost two. I must say, Debian is quite good
> compared to these other distro's. Perhaps RH is more stable than
> Sid/Sarge, but there is NO way to install a base system from a RH CD.
> The smallest install I was ever able to get was over 450MB and included
> LOTS of extras that I really didn't want.
>
> I see lots of people advocating Sid(unstable) as a desktop, but
> shouldn't people who are not developers/maintainers gravitate to
> Sarge?
In a word - no.
IMHO testing is *only* for developers who run a 2nd box to check
integration and freezing into stable. Testing usually is OK and
typically suffers from fewer bugs than unstable/sid. However, bugs
that do make it into testing are often not fixed and can linger for a
long time due to the semi-autonomous migration policies from unstable
to testing.
For example: last year sometime, gv got updated and needed a new
library version. The new library had some bug or other but the gv
didn't properly depend upon it. Thus gv entered testing but was
broken. No new library was coming because it got kept back. Despite
numerous bug reports, *testing* never got fixed until much later. It
got sorted in unstable within days. There is no mechanism for
actually fixing bugs in testing -- bugs are fixed in sid and trickle
down, *eventually*. Testing is last in getting security updates for
this reason as well.
> Isn't testing/debugging Sarge supposed to be a priority?
Perhaps, but in reality it does not appear be such. I tried using
testing but was unhappy with it and finally went to sarge. I feel
stable is for servers and people with 5 year old video cards.
Unstable is for everyone else (most people). Testing is for people
working on assembling the next stable on their spare boxen.
> Also, since
> packages automatically drop into sarge from Sid after 10 days (unless
> there is an unresolved issue), you are likely to get all the great new
> apps that you want, but without someone dropping in a new, "buggy"
> version by mistake.
"Likely", but in case of bug, there is no direct mechanism whereby
testing gets fixed. If, e.g., libc happens to rev during the 10 days
that a fix needs to wait, you can wait a really long time.
> Also, this would make more bug reports get filed against Sarge, which
> would help to progress it to the next stable.
Bug reports against sarge do not result in action fixing sarge
directly, but are filtered through sid and automated process. Stable
and sid are fixed directly. This makes testing the least maintained
of the three flavors.
> I realise that I have written these in a somewhat argumentative
> form,
And I have, perhaps cynically but honestly, responded
argumentatively. Hope the comments have helped.
> but read them as questions. As I said, I'm new here ( < 3 months ), but
> I have read up as much as I can find on the releases and the procedures
> for advancement.
>
> I have used Sarge for about 6 installs now (including upgrade from Woody
> and the new installer), and I'm very pleased with it's performance and
> package features. I used Woody for my file server (which now has a
> local Debian Mirror!), mostly because I don't care about the desktop on
> it, and I like to have the security patches, but I have Sarge running on
> two laptops, three desktops and a DB server. Also, I'm running Kernel
> 2.6.3 with the proprietary Nvidia driver and VMware Workstation on my
> work laptop. I note this because these things were exceptionally
> problematic on other distros, but were cheezy-eazy on Debian.
>
> --JATF
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: news [mailto:news@sea.gmane.org]On Behalf Of Monique Y. Mudama
> Sent: Monday, April 12, 2004 7:59 PM
> To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
> Subject: Re: Debian has turned unusable.
>
>
> On 2004-04-12, Adam Aube penned:
> > Monique Y. Mudama wrote:
> >
> >> Well, "more unstable than the stable distribution" takes a lot longer
> >> to type and wouldn't fit on a CD volume label =P
> >
> > What about "current", then?
> >
>
> This would encourage people to use the unstable distribution, which by
> definition isn't considered ready for prime time. The truth is that
> there are tradeoffs; a one-word name just isn't going to capture those
> tradeoffs. If anything, the right term for unstable might be "head" or
> "tip" -- or would that be experimental?
>
> But what do I know? I'm just a random user. It does seem to me that
> we've had the name game a few times, and every time a dev has strongly
> indicated that we should leave well enough alone.
>
> --
> monique
>
>
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--
Johan KULLSTAM
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