Benedict Verheyen wrote:
On a related note, I'm trying to understand the whole concept on stable - unstable because in a few weeks time i'm going to get the time from my current company to install some test servers with debian to compare them to windows. They will be running apache, tomcat,jboss and OpenCMS. They will expect stability but also the newest versions of the aformentioned softwares.
<snip>
"unstable" refers to the branch ("version") of Debian, not to any individual package. The unstable branch may get a new firefox today, a new apache tomorrow, another new firefox late tomorrow. But both of the firefoxes and the apache may very well be stable versions, and may very well play nice with whatever libraries, etc you already have installed. On the other hand, the new version of apache may require a new version of library "xyz", which may cause problems with openoffice.org, such that OO.o breaks, which of course means that OO.o is "unstable" (in the sense of brokeness) until a new version of OO.o makes it the unstable branch.It seems to me that if you have a server that only has 1 service running, for instance serving webpages, then it could be possible to run the unstable version of that package.
Thus, the Debian branch as a whole is constantly in flux, thus it's called "unstable" (in the sense of constantly changing), and really doesn't have anything to do with if a particular package is "unstable" (in the sense of broken).
-- Kent