On Fri, 2005-03-04 at 08:33 -0500, Hal Vaughan wrote:
> On Friday 04 March 2005 02:06 am, Mark Roach wrote:
--snip--
> > 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.
--snip--
> 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).
I think it's important to remember what the "unstable" in the Debian
sense actually refers to. As Mark pointed out, stable, testing, and
unstable refer to the Debian PLATFORM, not how often the system will
crash. A Sid system is no more likely to CRASH than a Woody or Sarge
system. A Sid system is just in a perpetual state of flux. Very few
things in Sid stay the same for more than a few weeks at a time.
Because of this, if you work in an organization where it is very
important to set something up once and never have it change ("if it
ain't broke, don't fix it") a stable install makes sense. This is not
because the system is less likely to crash than a Sid system, but
because 10 updates down the road, you'll still be running the same
version of software with no major changes (except for security fixes).
If you work as an administrator, this can make your life a LOT easier.
(Just ask any DBA who has had to go from MySQL 3.x to 4.x overnight on a
production machine.)
--
Alex Malinovich
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Encrypted mail preferred. You can get my public key from any of the
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