Re: Jessie sufficiently stable for general use?
Quoting Miles Fidelman (mfidelman@meetinghouse.net) in a previous posting:
> 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.
Jessie is not Debian stable.
Wheezy is Debian stable.
Quoting Miles Fidelman (mfidelman@meetinghouse.net):
> Brian wrote:
> >On Sat 07 Mar 2015 at 09:14:31 -0500, Miles Fidelman wrote:
> >>--- 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)
> >Breakage in Debian in this regard does not appear to be common. Do you
> >have an example?
>
> Can't think of a specific example, but it's fairly common to install
> a package, and find that it pulls in lots of dependencies. Perl
> applications come to mind as particularly finicky about "requires
> version xxx or higher of package yyy."
That's why Debian stable and Debian oldstable have such old versions
of software, and the exceptions (like browsers, see 5.2 in
https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/release-notes/ch-information.html
) have no role on servers.
> >>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
> >Sounds like Debian stable.
>
> Does, doesn't it. Though... I've yet to find a "stable" version of
> anything (Debian included) that's really wrung out in its initial
> release. And, I'll repeat, if folks are recommending daily updates
> to Jessie, then it doesn't sound all that "stable" to me.
Jessie is Debian testing and is frozen. Maintainers should be
releasing bugfixes thick and fast. Unless you update regularly,
you won't know about them and unless you upgrade regularly, you
won't get the benefits.
Because new versions of software are excluded and bugfixes are being
made, then the distribution should only improve with time. So if the
OP is running non-servers (he said desktops), and he's happy with the
comments from satisfied users of jessie, then I would suggest that
"sufficiently stable for such installations" has little to do with
your meaning of stable, and nothing to do with Debian's.
> >>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.
> >Sounds like Debian stable.
> >
> >I hope we are not going to quibble about how many months there are in
> >"months at a time".
>
> I'll repeat - not if folks are saying it needs daily updates.
>
> >
> >>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 featurea
> >Sounds like Debian stable.
>
> Same again.
> >
> >>-- responding to a CERT alert about a newly discovered vulnerability
> >Sounds like Debian stable.
> >
> >
> Same again.
>
> Which brings us back to the OP's original question, paraphrased
> slightly: "Is Jessie stable?" (In either the plain English, or the
> Debian sense of the word.)" To me, I'd answer that two ways:
> - by the Debian definition, Jessie is "testing" - hence explicitly
> NOT "stable"
> - by the plain English definition - if it needs daily updating, then
> it's NOT "stable" enough for general use
I think that if you going to debate the meanings of words, then you
should be precise about which meaning you are using.
https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2015/03/msg00212.html
gives a summary of the terms update and upgrade in the Debian sense,
as does man apt-get. https://www.debian.org/releases/ gives a summary
of the terms stable etc.
If you read these, you may perceive that a daily (at least) update is
a perfectly sensible course of action for any Debian version. The
package lists are updated in a highly efficient manner. You'll see
"Hit" in place of "Get" when a file is unchanged, and any transfers
are made efficient with diffs.
If you're tracking Debian stable on a non-server, then an upgrade on a
similar schedule is sensible too. For days/weeks at a time the result
will be "Nothing happens". If you're running a server, just add -d and
any new packages will be downloaded and not installed. You can then
examine the changes log.
If you don't update and upgrade (in the Debian sense) frequently, then
you're wasting the timely efforts of the Debian Security Team, see
https://www.debian.org/security/
Here's my cron command for running update and upgrade -d regularly.
The find command provokes an email if /var/cache/apt/archives has
any .deb files in it. Any trouble: I get told, every day on stable and
every three hours on testing (all through an apt-cacher-ng).
apt-get -qq update && apt-get -qq -d upgrade && find /var/cache/apt/archives/ -name '*deb'
Cheers,
David.
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