Jules Dubois wrote:
On Mon, 21 Jun 2004 14:38:51 -0500, Michael Satterwhite wrote:On Monday 21 June 2004 12:03, Monique Y. Mudama wrote:If you're trying to avoid any downtime or difficulty whatsoever, run stable and live with the age of the packages.Not exactly promoting Debian, are we?She is. Debian stable is an excellent argument in favor of running a Debian release. There's no other distribution or flavor providing its reliability or availability. I think perhaps "stable", "testing", and "unstable" were not the absolutely, positively best choices for the flavors but I can't say I could have done any better. These comments are however immaterial.
Considering the fact that most distributions ship what debian would consider testing, and another OS sells unstable as a finished product, I think debian's flavor choices give users a good idea of what they are getting. If you need a machine that just runs, then stable is what you want. If your coming from another dist. and are used to applying patches regularly, testing is a good choice. If your coming from the other OS and are used to applying patches, recovering from crashes and having to go in and fix things manually, use unstable, although you might be disappointed, or board, because it's likely that you will have more time on your hands to actually use the machine then you did with the other OS (even though the other OS was released as 'stable' in 2002).
Personally, my mission critical corp. servers run stable, all other servers run testing because I have work to do, and I can't take the chance of having to tell an executive that a machine, running 'unstable' has crashed, and I need to spend his/her time getting it to run again.
Others here, however, are doing a much better job.You've missed the point and owe an apology.