Re: Another "testing" vs "unstable" question
On Wed, Jun 23, 2004 at 06:32:08AM +0000, John Summerfield wrote:
> Monique Y. Mudama wrote:
>
> >On 2004-06-23, John Summerfield penned:
> >
> >
> >>I have been to www.apt-get.org and I got Mozilla from here, pine from
> >>there, KDE from somewhere else, Xfree from another... Do you get the
> >>picture?
> >>
> >>
> >
> >Well, just to be pedantic, you wouldn't find pine anywhere in debian
> >because of its licensing terms.
> >
> >
>
> Quite irrelevant to the point.
>
> >
> >
> >>A coordinated, official system of official backports would be a fine
> >>thing, and the workforce to do it is already there - they're the
> >>people making these unofficial backports.
> >>
> >>
> >
> >Yes, but there's no way to test those backports thoroughly enough to
> >match the amount of testing that went into stable in the first place.
> >
> >
>
>
> Do you believe that?
Yes, she does, and I do as well. And I _think_ (don't want to use some
shadow force of people supposed to back me up) a lot of people on this
list agree since they _are_ running Debian.
> >>Until Red Hat Linux 8.0, Red Hat had two cycles of releases:
> >>
> >>Major numbers, 5.x, 6.x, 7.x maintained binary compatibility. Those
> >>came out with about the same frequencies as Debian releases.
> >>
> >>
> >
> >And the dot-oh releases were well known to be buggy piles of crap.
> >There was always some nasty gotcha lurking in the system. I don't know
> >why that was the case, but it definitely held true from at least 4 to 6,
> >maybe 7. Somewhere in there I stopped having to care because I switched
> >to Debian.
> >
> >
> I switched over from OS/2 to 5.0. I was surprised later to discover
> people regarded it as buggy. I don't recall how much I used 6.0, but
> where I work we still have a 7.0 box in place: I chose 7.0 over 7.1 so
> as to have a 2.2 kernel as standard (required for a sat card).
>
> The most troublesome system I have is one running Woody, the video
> regularly gets stuffed up and it's prone to losing its keyboard.
>
> Changing the graphics card made no difference.
Have you made extensive use of this list to try to do something about
it? What is your problem? What is the system? Is the motherboard broke?
I only ask that last one because woody is not supposed to be _that_
buggy. Was the new card another brand/model? Which drivers are you
running? Did the box work fine before you installed woody?
If you have any intention of seriously asking help for this, please
start a new thread.
> >>Then there were the minor releases, x.[0-3] coming out at about
> >>six-monthly intervals. One could take a package from x.2 and install
> >>it with minimal bother on x.0 or x.1, with every expectation of not
> >>breaking anything.
> >>
> >>It's a model Debian would do well to look at and see how it can adapt
> >>it, adopt it. Using this model, Sarge would be 4.0, not 3.1 because it
> >>breaks binary compatibility (new gcc, new glibc).
> >>
> >>
> >
> >It sounds like a lot more work for the developers. RedHat had
> >commercial customers to support their developers. How would you suggest
> >Debian manage this?
> >
> >
> >
> I thnk Red Hat didn't have commercial customers when it started on this
> model.
>
> As I already said, there are enough developers doing enough work - the
> packages are out there. What is missing official adoption by Debian, and
> the coordination that would follow its adoption.
What would that be? Official adoption?
> If there was an official line of "built for Stable" packages comprising
> packages people felt were needed, linked to from the dowload page, be
> sure a lot of people would try them out.
And lose some of that rock solid stability Debian is renowned for.
> If there are regular betas to test, new releases to run with then there
> is more news to get published on sites such as theregister.co.uk
Maybe. A shorter release cycle would be great if that same stability
could be retained. But I like Debian's release cycle philosophy: never
hurry. If you do, you run into problems.
If you don't agree with that philosophy, run unstable or another distro.
That's the nice thing about Debian: it will do nothing to let you keep
using it. Not that Debian is that arrogant, but because Debian has its
uses for _some_ people. If you're not one of them, that's ok.
David
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