On 16/05/15 08:18 PM, Liam O'Toole wrote:
On 2015-05-16, Anil Duggirala <anilduggirala@fastmail.fm> wrote:Im a newbie and would like to know why libraries in Jessie are some much more up to date than in wheezy ? If the libraries have been tested and are stable then why arent they available in the wheezy repositories. I had a terrible time, trying to get a newer version of glibc to play some games in wheezy, and the version in jessie is much more up to date, thanks for the info,The vey meaning of "stable" in a Debian context is that software versions don't (usually) change over the course of a release. Therefore it's no surprise that libraries in jessie (released last month) are more up-to-date than those in wheezy (released in 2013).
Just to put that in context. I had a server which originally ran Squeeze without problems. I upgraded to Wheezy some time later, again without problems. Somewhere over the course of Wheezy updates however, something broke.
The motherboard had USB3 ports and AMD graphics (although it was headless - just in case I needed to hook a monitor up) and the IOMMU started acting up (Strangely I have a workstation running Jessie with a similar problem). Even though the updates were mainly security fixes, I lost the ability to remotely (re)start the machine. My ssh connection couldn't establish because the IOMMU code for this particular board was broken. I had to be on site with monitor and keyboard to boot to repair mode then manually start the services I needed.
Last week I found myself having to upgrade to Jessie to fix the issue. Although Jessie code is what is currently causing the problem with my workstation, it fixed the problem on the server.
Stories like this abound, which is why people are leery about upgrading critical systems. Stable means that only serious bug fixes and security updates are issued, not feature enhancements. Limiting the numbers of updates means that larger installations get to test them before running them live, while smaller setups like small or home offices can usually feel safe performing updates.
Normally I wouldn't upgrade a server until the .1 release of the new Debian stable. In this case, I had a problem so I took a chance that upgrading on the .0 release would fix more than it broke. Thanks to the quality of the Debian development process, the upgrade went smoothly and the system is running properly again.
If you want to keep up with the latest libraries, etc., run Debian/Testing permanently. This is fairly stable but you will encounter problems from time to time, as you will with any "rolling release" distro.