Le nonidi 9 floréal, an CCXXIII, Lisi Reisz a écrit : > You ask if it is stable enough for a personal computer. How long is a piece > of string? I personally would let it settle a bit before going over to > Stretch. Others have testing in their sources lists and went straight over > to Stretch last Sunday. I do not think that "let it settle" makes a lot of sense given the way the unstable-testing-stable transition works. If you want to use testing (or unstable), you need frequent upgrades, or you are in for a lot of pain when you do the upgrade. On Sunday, testing and stable were identical. Now that the release is done and the freeze period is over, new versions and new packages will start arriving. And because of the six-month-long freeze, developers are eager to push them, so the first few weeks will have big daily upgrades. Waiting before migrating from stable to testing is the same as not upgrading a testing box for the same time regardless of releases (except you get security upgrades, of course): when you do migrate, it will be painful. Another remark: testing is not stable does not mean that it will crash, corrupt the disk or whatever. It may happen, but the worse bugs are eliminated by the Debian developers themselves, and the worse remaining-ones are blocked by the unstable-testing quarantine. What it really means is that the packaging is unstable. Packages may be added, removed, renamed, split. For example, an upgrade can be blocked by a package that you installed six month ago and that has later been removed. Behaviours will change too, you may get a server that no longer starts just because the syntax of the config file has changed. That is the kind of instability with non-stable Debian. With stable, theoretically, you can let cron do the upgrades and never worry because each upgrade is supposed to be a completely drop-in replacement. Regards, -- Nicolas George
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