Re: How stable is SID?
On Friday 04 March 2005 02:06 am, Mark Roach wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-03-01 at 10:30 -0500, Rick Friedman wrote:
> > Currently, I am running Sarge on my home machine. I am thinking of doing
> > a dist-upgrade to SID. I am ready to deal with any problems that may
> > crop up. However, I DO have other people in the house who use the
> > machine as well. I am wondering if SID is, at least, reasonably stable?
>
> SID is, by one definition of the term, completely unstable. In fact, it
> is as unstable as you can get. The stability referred to by the "stable"
> moniker refers to the stability of package versions and dependencies,
> the versions of software in a stable release almost never change. In
> unstable, new versions are being added all the time. If you are viewing
> the OS as a platform, stable is a stationary target, unstable is quite
> the opposite.
>
> -Mark
Listening to someone say that before caused me a lot of confusion, since it is
a literal interpretation. Yes, Sid is, by definition unstable. I remember
when I switched from Windows to Mandrake and found the number of crashes
(either software or the whole system), went down about 95-99%. There were
still glitches, but it was a huge improvement. Then I switched to what I'm
running now (mostly Woody, but some Sarge). The crashes dropped about 95-99%
from what I had with Mandrake (about the only crashes I get now are when
Firefox tries to load in a picture that's too big, or whenever KSCD gets a
new CD and reads it from cddb).
HOWEVER, I have had systems running Sid. While Sid is, by definition,
unstable, I found it to be even more stable than Mandrake. I think it's
important to understand the "Debian" point of view: The goal of Debian is to
have a distro with free (as in speech) software that is as stable as possible
so anyone installing it can count on not having to maintain the system (other
than cron jobs for security jobs and the like). In other words, as close to
a 0% crash rate as possible. There's also the other point of view: Debian,
as an organization, and as individual developers, should not have to deal
with those who use Sid and expect it to be as stable as Stable. In other
words, disclaimers are important and only right.
From that point of view, you are 100% right, but most of what I have seen
whenever I hear people discussing Debian and what is stable and what isn't,
real screwups on Sid don't seem to happen too often. My experience is that
for each person that says, "Sid is too unstable, it blew up in my face," I
hear 20 or more people saying, "It's called unstable, but it's still as or
more stable than other distros."
So would I count on it for a production box? No. Would I count on it on my
workstation? Likely not, but as long as I have another box (like a
production one) that I can switch to if I have to, I have no issue with Sid
on my workstation. Yes, it is unstable by definition, but that does not mean
it is unstable by practice and experience. Imperfect, yes, but not to the
point where I'd use the same word I use to describe a vial of nitroglycerin.
Hal
Reply to: