Re: Sid is Sid, before or after a release, right?
On Sat, Aug 07, 2004 at 07:28:56PM -0700, William Ballard wrote:
> I run Sid. Whenever Debian makes a major release, it doesn't affect me
> at all, right, because in theory I'm already running the same or later
> versions of everything that's being released.
>
> Right?
>
Right. You should know what you are doing to run sid and, ideally, be
subscribed to at least debian-devel - sid can be dynamically unstable
on very rare occasions. "Unstable" primarily relates to the rate of
change - there is a lot of package churn and daily changes - but
Sid breaks all the toys, remember :)
You can, very occasionally, get bitten by sid changes. However, as the
fastest moving target, breakages get fixed fast. Testing is, as it says,
testing the target for the next release: in theory, it should always be
more or less immediately releasable with a little work. In practice, it
is a "delayed track" of Sarge - all the bugs should be knocked out
within testing before release as stable.
Stable is unconditionally stable. Period/full stop. It's been tested to
death over the year or more before release. Very rarely will any
changes apart from security changes be rolled into stable. Point
releases will be made but the cumulative changes will be small. Stable
releases are relatively rare - look for one in the next couple of months
- but you can rely on stable to work. As stable gets older and older,
people tend to add backports from testing/unstable - this works, but is
potentially at your own risk.
IMHO - run stable if you are running big financial
applications/clusters/ISP hosting - anything where you want 99.999%
reliability. Run testing otherwise for general day to day work /
development but bring it up to date every month or so.
Run unstable if you want the latest/greatest on the day, if a brand new
kernel is the only thing that supports your brand new AMD64 laptop/whatever
or if you are a Debian developer. A developer may potentially need access
to at least three machines - one on each of unstable/testing/stable - but
given that I have five i386, one Alpha and a Sparc here, for example,
I suspect that's not too hard a target for most developers to match :)
Andy
:)
>
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