Re: New policies?
On 02/14/2011 04:32 PM, Erin Brinkley wrote:
One thing I would like to add is that when Debian has a major upgrade, it
should ALWAYS keep your config files.
It does. Unless you tell it otherwise.
I know that it asks whether you want
to install the new maintainer version or keep your old, but this is always
a headache. I think the best answer is to merge the new features/options
with the current existing user's version.
Some packages have this option, but while it helps, it is generally not
possible for a machine to automatically merge configurations. Sometimes
it works, but there might be situations where manual intervention is
necessary.
Also, for work systems I always just use stable. I don't need the newest
version if it means something might break. But I do feel like things are
getting harder to keep up, like maybe "stable" is getting too old. It
would be nice as you say to upgrade some of the big packages slowly,
somehow, without breaking 100 other dependencies.
That's what backports are for, aren't they? Upgrades of some important
packages while keeping the rest of the system in the stable distribution.
No more Toy Story names, but you just pick stable or unstable or testing
or experimental, and then upgrades happen incrementally, slowly, every day
or every week instead of every year or year and a half you have this huge
upgrade that breaks everything and causes mass chaos for about a week.
That seems to be the description of testing and unstable: incremental
upgrades all the time. Naturally they cannot have been tested for so
long as "stable", but you can't have the cake and eat it.
--
Men of quality are not afraid of women for equality.
Eduardo M KALINOWSKI
eduardo@kalinowski.com.br
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