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Re: What happened to debian - does "stable" keep having any meaning?



On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 04:15:37PM +0100, Reinhard Mantey wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> 
> I admit, my main problem is mostly ideologic, but isn't it a rule of debian 
> stable, that no update will break a running system?
> The last update did break my system.

I don't think that's what stable means in the Debian world. Stable means
unchanging. A stable release of Debian is one where new features are NOT
added. This is great for end users who want to know that their machine
won't break all of a sudden because some API has disappeared or
whatever.

However, the world moves on between these stable releases so it is
likely that your system will change. That's what testing is for.

Let me clarify that. Say I run a server providing some service to the
world. I want to know that, if I run my service on Debian Stable my
service will run without significant problems for the life of the Stable
release. I won't have to recompile my custom libraries, I won't have to
majorly reconfigure it etc.

However, in the mean time, I might be stuck on, say, a 2.4 kernel. So in
parallel, I run a development server on which I run testing. At some
point testing updates to a 2.6 kernel and I find I need to redesign my
service to handle that. Testing gives me months, perhaps a couple of
years to get this done so that, when I update the live system from
oldstable to stable, I can also update my service and voila! minimum
disruption.

Stable probably WILL break at updates, but it SHOULDN'T between updates.

> 
> So what's wrong with my point of view (beside the fact that I'm too 
> emotional)?
> 
> 
> kind regards
> 
> Gero
> 
> 
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