Patrick Bartek wrote:
On Fri, 06 Mar 2015, Miles Fidelman wrote:Brian wrote:On Fri 06 Mar 2015 at 09:27:23 -0800, Patrick Bartek wrote:On Fri, 06 Mar 2015, Ken Heard wrote:Thanks everybody for the collected wisdom. So for me now Jessie RC1 is it.FYI: Do daily updates using dist-upgrade, instead of upgrade (or the equivalent with aptitude, if you use that). Things change quickly and sometimes majorly on the path to Stable. You'll want to get ALL those changes -- minor and major. "Upgrade" won't do that. This is recommended by Debian. Once Jessie is Stable, revert to "upgrade" for the most part.I agree with everything but the final sentence. Stable is unlikely to pull in any new packages but if it does you will likely need them. In other words, 'dist-upgrade' should be the norm for stable.Somehow, anything that needs daily updates, or upgrades, does not meet any definition of "stable" that I'm familiar with.As far a Debian is concerned, you have the incorrect definition of "stable." With Debin "Stable" means "unchanging," without serious bugs, not less prone to crash. It's confusing, I agree. I wish a different term had been chosen.
I think the question was quite clear as to meaning - the OP asked is Jessie (i.e., Debian stable), stable (in the plain English use of the word) enough for general use. Not confusing at all.
Security and bug fixes are a part of every OS and app. I "update" my system database daily, that is I check daily for any "fixes." Some do so weekly. In any case, this may require "upgrading," i.e. something new is installed replacing something old that needs the fix, about every week or two. Sometimes, it can be one tiny library; other times it can be a dozen system files, including the kernel.
Well, yes and no.-- Yes: Typical desktop operating systems (e.g., Windows, Mac OS), and applications, "call home" periodically to check for updates, but,
-- No:--- in enterprise environments, that's typically disabled - with updates distributed internally on a less frequent basis --- this is particularly true in server and system environments, that are under maintenance -- one doesn't want updates to the O/S to break application software (as it quite often does)
Beyond that, pretty much any systems administrator will tell you that "stable" is a pretty well understood concept. It's the point at which:
-- most bugs, not caught during product testing, have been caught and fixed-- enough security scrubbing has been done that the code has been relatively well hardened
There will always be a few bugs, and there's always the new security exploit around the corner - but with any halfway decent coding and testing practices, those should be few and far between - to the point that an update/upgrade should rarely be necessary.
To me, a "stable" system - and mind you, I'm talking about servers here - is one that doesn't need updating or upgrading for months at a time, if at all; except in the cases of:
-- deploying new application software that requires a new o/s feature -- responding to a CERT alert about a newly discovered vulnerability Miles Fidelman -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra