On Wed, Feb 22, 2023 at 10:20:39PM +0000, ghe2001 wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA256 > > I use XFCE4 for my GUI desktop, and I subscribe to XFCE's discussion list. I see lots of posts on the list about XFCE things being updated, but I run stable, and I've been told to stick to only Debian updates. What, if anything, happens to the updates advertised by XFCE? Do they go into Sid? Testing? I'd recommend [1] or, for the more technical description, [2]. In a nutshell, software (major) versions don't change in the stable distribution unless something very bad happens. Maintainers prefer to backport security and other fixes to the versions already there. This is what "stable" means. As a corollary, interfaces between the different parts stay more or less stable. One package update doesn't carry a flurry of dependency updates after it. The nice part of that is that you can, most of the time, just "apt update && apt upgrade" without much risk. You pay for that with somewhat older versions. When some "upstream" (as Debian calls that: in your case it would be XFCE) publishes a new version, that goes first into sid. There it breaks other things (that's why it is called sid). When it stops breaking things it goes into testing. At some point in time (called "freeze"), the stream of packages from sid to testing is stopped: that's when the new stable version is about to hatch from testing. Once that is done, the stream from sid to the new testing starts again. That was a very rough map, possibly with some corners cut. Cheers [1] https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-faq/choosing.en.html [2] https://www.debian.org/releases/ -- t
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature