Re: New policies?
On Mon, 14 Feb 2011 10:32:20 -0800 (PST)
Erin Brinkley <erinbrinkley@ymail.com> wrote:
>>
> Is something like this doable / desirable or do we have to just wait
> every year or so and then do a major upgrade? Like I said I would SO
> prefer to just upgrade software incrementally all the time. It would
> reduce user headaches plus it would keep Debian much more up to date.
>
Then use unstable, which would seem to be exactly what you want. Never
do a large upgrade, just cope with a never-ending stream of minor
issues. But while packages are as autonomous as they can possibly be,
there are interactions, and some large ones. Some packages do need to
be upgraded in groups. A new version of a desktop environment may well
need many new libraries, which may have implications for hundreds of
other packages. Sometimes it doesn't go smoothly, and a few things are
unusable for a few days. There's always Ubuntu...
It's mostly a matter of application, horses for courses. I run a Debian
workstation and server. There's nothing of value stored on the
workstation, just applications, nearly all with Debian default
configurations. No real problem if there's an unresolvable issue (at
least at my level), just rip it out and reinstall. It's not even the
end of the world if it needs complete reinstallation, as on the
occasion of the upgrade to grub2, when I ended up with a non-booting
system that I was completely unable to fix. [...grumble...never used to
happen with lilo... ten minutes and tomsrtbt would fix anything...and
nine minutes of that was remembering how to drive vi...] There's hardly
any custom configuration involved. So I run unstable on my workstation,
and I don't even bother backing it up, apart from the package list
and /etc.
On the other hand, my server runs some heavy stuff with serious custom
configurations, such as freeradius and an Internet-facing exim4. I
don't want to have to muck about with that kind of software every month
or so when something breaks. It must be five years since I last tangled
with openLDAP, and it would take me a week to learn how to configure it
again. Yes, it's a bit traumatic at upgrade time, but things have had up
to two years to settle in testing, to the point where upgrade issues are
fairly well-known.
Server software *doesn't* change dramatically from year to year. LDAP
is still LDAP, SMTP is still SMTP, neither very much different from a
decade ago. We don't need frequent updates to server software, so it
doesn't happen. And after the two-yearly trauma is over, we can forget
about it until next time. Just the security updates, which are pretty
well tested.
So while you may want a more up-to-date desktop, spare a thought for
people running servers. Stable, under the current policies, is exactly
what's needed there.
--
Joe
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