Re: testing or stable
On Tuesday 28 April 2015 09:48:43 Nicolas George wrote:
> 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.
And at the end of all that, it is still a matter of personal choice whether to
move over or not. One man's meat is another man's poison.
Lisi
Reply to: