Re: New policies?
> Well, I want to like to suggest, to slightly change the policy for
> debian/stable. Please let me explain. In the past years I am using
> debian (now for more than 8 years), there always was a problem with
> debian/stable whenever things changed, and new versions of applications
> or libs were not allowed to enter in stable. Doing so, all people using
> stable were not able to use theire programms before, as things changed.
> Among a lot of examples, just let me pick one to explain, I choose
> "Pidgin" (kopete, as well)
>
> As yahoo and ICQ protocols were changed, pidgin was released in a new
> version with new libs. Everything went fine for testing and unstable
> users, but stable users could not use pidgin or kopete any more.
>
> Such things happen and will happen in our fast changing times again and
> again, and IMO especially stable-users want a system that is running
> stable. But debian policy is causing more trouble than expected.
>
> I also think, that major changes in applications (here are especially
> kde, gnome, Openoffice.org in my mind) should also beeing transferred to
> debian/stable when they are running stable enough or the current
> versions are out-of-state-of-the-art. Mentioning KDE (just as an
> example), IMO 2 years of waiting is a likttle bit too long, as a) every
> distribution has already KDE4 since a long time, b) KDE4 was running for
> a long, long time very stable and c) KDE3 was already for a long long
> time much obsolete. (the same things are at OpenOffice.org-2.4.1 from
> stable- obsolete, unmodern, bad usable due to obsolete/worse
> import/export filters)
>
> Please try to understand my extensions (and do not blame me, I am using
> testing for myself), but I think stable-users should not to be forced to
> choose between obsolete/not working applications or update the whole
> system.
>
> There should be better way (without dealing with apt-pinning or
> similar), my idea and suggestion is, just to transfer necessary newer
> versions (and hand- picked) of libs and applications to stable. But that
> would require the change of the debian policies (and of course the
> agreement of users, developers and ftp-masters).
This doesn't sound like much sense to me. I mean, the whole point of
having a stable release is for it to be stable -- in case of Debian
that's aimed at _extremely_ stable. You can't have a stable release if
you keep introducing new, potentially buggy packages into it. It's like
you were proposing to change stable into a mixed stable/testing system.
But then again you aren't forced to use an obsolete release -- as you are
aware of, Debian also has the testing release which is updated
constantly. It seams that your main problem with it is that it's *called*
testing instead of stable. And as someone already pointed out, there's
debian backports. These are only limited updates for stable, but still
better than nothing.
When I first came to Debian I installed stable, because I thought that
testing would be to problematic for me. It took me no more than a couple
of months to realize that if I want to use updated software I can't stick
to stable. So I updated to testing and guess what -- it turned out that
testing is in fact quite stable. So I don't really see your point. If you
want updates, simply ignore stable and use testing. In fact you can think
of testing as an updated stable release and treat sid as the testing
branch.
At this point I'd like to thank Debian's developers for doing their great
job. Thanks guys, this system's awesome!
Regards,
KB
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