Robert Brockway wrote:
On Mon, 28 Feb 2005, Eric Gaumer wrote:I don't really understand peoples concern. If Sarge was released tomorrow it would be the same group of packages sitting there today (relatively speaking). My point is if you think Sarge is stable (which it is) then go ahead and upgrade/install. What difference do the politics play? Security fixesIt's not the politics - its the policy. Debian approaches Stable and Testing releases differently. Can I apt-get update && apt-get upgrade a Sarge box with the same confidence that nothing will break that I put into Woody? If so then this needs to be stated because AFAIk Sarge is not even in code freeze yet - something might break badly at the next upgrade. I can't take this risk in production. Also, security updates are not formally applied seperately to the Testing distro - this is also a big deal for a box in production. Cheers, Rob
Well we have over 300 Debian servers in production most running Sarge. So you claim that things could break badly during an upgrade (and that seems to be everyones argument) but I can tell you that if you are not careless then things wont break. Check the bug reports before upgrading some some major piece of software that you fully rely on. We have our own Debian repository where we refine packages that need it and package software that isn't part of Debian (some proprietary). We have special test environments where we can evaluate the system software. It's just a matter of your staff's talent. Nothing comes cost free. Debian does a very good job of providing three stable pools of software to pull from (yes three). In the end, it's your talent that dictates which one you will use. If they (Debian) rushed things out the door or made haste decisions then people would complain about bugs. They take the time to "get it right" but people complain things move to slowly. Bottom is you can't please everyone. It would be a different story if they only offered Woody. That simply isn't the case. You have the choice to decide what you want. You want the newest stuff yet you want it guaranteed free of problems. If anyone thinks this a small burden then I recommend you give it a try. If it was that easy you would all be running Sarge and "stabilizing" it on your own. It's not that easy because I deal with it daily. For instance, we have an LDAP server that houses about 6000 users for a Postfix mail server. It's been having serious issues due the select() system call limitations. New versions (upstream) have a compile time option that enables many more connections. I spent an entire weekend re-packaging slapd and all of its dependencies so that they would integrate into our Debian environment. It does me no good to complain about why newer packages aren't available. I get paid to make things happen and I appreciate all the work the Debian maintainers do to make my life easier so the least I could do is handle certain issues on my own. Isn't that what open source is all about? If this still isn't making sense then get involved with the Debian and see just how much stuff is involved with a new release. Most just take these things for granted. Sorry... didn't mean to ramble. I just wish everyone would redirect their angst of releasing Sarge toward helping it's release rather complaining about its delay. You don't need to be a developer to report a bug. If you have a production environment then setup a test machine to track potential problems. This would help speed up new releases... -- "Imagination is more important than knowledge." - Albert Einstein
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