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Re: Running testing? -- read this.

Damon L. Chesser a écrit :

On Thu, 2008-06-05 at 01:11 +1200, Chris Bannister wrote:

----- Forwarded message from Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> -----

User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/23.0.60 (gnu/linux) (x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu)
From: Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org>
Date: Tue, 03 Jun 2008 12:14:03 -0500
To: debian-devel@lists.debian.org
Subject: Re: Bug#484129: release.debian.org: packages in tasks should be fixed in priority and removed in last resort after
	discussion

SNIP

OK, my two cents worth:  Testing is for testing.  If you are not
testing, you don't run it.  Testing is NOT meant to be a working
release, never has been.  Nobody cares if Testing is broke.  They will
fix it.  But it will bet fixed when they have the fix for it: no one
will loose sleep over the non-functioning of Testing (except for the
user trying to use Testing as his/hers workstation).

Now the above is my observation, not the Debian policy.

see:  http://www.us.debian.org/releases/ and
http://www.us.debian.org/doc/FAQ/ch-ftparchives#s-testing for the
official Debian policy.  Joey Hess has said on this list that in his
experience Testing was seldom broke and seldom for any length of time
and should work as a desktop for most people (Joey Hess is one of the
Debian Developers).

Any time you leave Stable, you leave all promise behind that Debian will
work.  I run Sid or Ubuntu.  Sid has only become unusable for me only
once (PAM broke during an update). If you insists on running Testing OR
Unstable there is one program you MUST run:  apt-get apt-listbugs  you
have to read the output before proceeding to any updating.  This will
save your bacon.
HTH
I'm just an average Testing user, have been for a while, and around me almost every Debian users I know are using Testing, mostly because it's the Debian's flavour which can compare with other distros in term of being usable on a reasonably new computer, with up-to-date softwares. Stable is for servers only, Testing for end users / workstations, that is what's in many people's minds. I thought Sid was the toy-breaking one, at least it says "unstable" on the box, it's explicit. Testing has became so popular that it can barely be considered a developer-only version, and according to my experience (i use it for work, along with Ubuntu stations... scary no ?) it has always been at least as reliable as Ubuntu. I do agree with apt-listbugs, I use it and think it would make sens to include it as a default in Testing and all the more in Sid, the only issue with it is the non architecture specific massages : output being cluttered with warnings because a package doesn't work on arm isn't very relevant for a x86-64 user.
Testing is the right choice for me, and if it no longer is I would move to another distro immediately. Etch doesn't even install on many recent machines.
Is there statistics about number of hit-per-version on debian.org servers ? Would be interesting to know the balance between Stable vs Testing usage. 

Tom
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