Re: How unstable is Unstable?
On Sun, 19 Mar 2006 12:50:21 -0500
"Leonid Grinberg" <lgrinberg@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I must say that I love Debian. It is an amazing system that has never
> failed me, and, although we had our ups and downs, continues to serve
> me loyally and fully.
>
> But there is one thing that annoys me about it, and that is how long a
> package needs to be tested for, before it gets verified as not
> dangerous.
This is what ensures the very high quality of the packages.
> I use Testing, myself, and am annoyed by a few things. I
> used to hate the Debian Firefox package, because it took so long to
> get updated. Eventually, I removed it, and I now use the
> Mozilla-supplied program, something that I highly recommend. But what
> really bugs me is GNOME. Debian finally supplied GNOME 2.12 in Testing
> about a month before GNOME 2.14 came out. And it is harder to replace,
> because in order to use the code from gnome.org, one needs to
> recompile it and then set it up by hand, something that I feel I am
> not qualified to do.
>
> Unstable, I know, does not have this problem. So I am wondering, how
> unstable is it? I might be getting a new computer within a few months,
> and am considering installing Debian Unstable on it. But what should I
> expect? Will it crash a few times a month, or a day? How much work is
> it?
>
> Thank you very much!
>
> --
> Leonid Grinberg
AFAIK a package takes 10 days to propagate from unstable into testing. That is, if there are no serious (RC?) bugs reported against it, and I think it is also a matter of dependencies especially for big stuff like gnome (with lots of dependencies). So you can see, unstable is more up to date than testing but, ... You can't really expect that some software gets packaged immediately after release. Even if the maintainer has nothing else to do than release that package, it may still take some time to package it up to Debian standards. The gnome case is much more complicated, and the Debian gnome team has already asked for help. It will be some time until they have the packages ready, even for unstable.
Now to your question: I am running unstable for 5(?) months now. I have not experienced crashes. Once I got it running it is stable as a rock, but ... the emphasis is on getting it running. First problems I encountered were during the dist-upgrade. Mostly dependency stuff which I sorted out pretty easy. Next problem was during a kernel image upgrade. I upgraded the running kernel without having a backup (won't do THAT again). The yaird package (which got upgraded at the same time) was buggy so I ended with an unbootable system. Had to chroot from Knoppix to fix that. Next break was due to the unofficial package splashy. Nice bootsplash, but it made my system unbootable at one upgrade. Booting single user and purging the package was the only solution I found. I installed it back a few weeks later and all was ok. I guess they fixed it.
To make the long story short, maybe I'm just lucky, but watching this list I think unstable is pretty stable. If a package has bugs, they get fixed pretty quick and the very nature of how linux is built it (usually) doesn't affect the rest of the system. But DON'T use it if you need your system to Just Work (tm). This is what 'stable' is for. You will get in additional problems with unstable, which will require your time to solve. OTOH you get to learn lots of new things about your computer and your favorite OS ;-) For me this is fun.
Of course, everything here is just my 0.02, IMHO, YMMV, ... you get the picture :)
Andrei
--
If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough. (Albert Einstein)
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