Re: debian unstable, stable enough?

[David Baron <d_baron@012.net.il>]

I think it is becoming overstated. "Unstable" means changing, not the usual 
meaning that the software is unstable and thus unusable. I used to do things 
answering yes, yes, etc. Never really had a big problem with it. I now do a 
test run first and find out that stuff will be removed so skip the offenders. 
Apt-listbugs warns me of other stuff to wait on. Sid is usually just fine.

This said, however, the word "unstable" is no pass to post packages that doom 
someone's box. A few weeks ago, I had that xorg ABI problem. Once I got xorg 
going again by futsing around with paths in my xorg.conf (no way the 
packager's version due to all the ATI mach64 DRI business, now no longer 
relevant, using Nvidia), there were no fonts showing in KDE. All in all 
however, the box still worked and with some trouble got snapshots through the 
wounded KDE (using Opera which showed some text) and with a perfectly OK 
command line console finally installed the xorg package that instantly fixed 
it a all day later. But this is, as said, not for everyone. We owe it to our 
community to exercise elemental care in posting upgrades.