Re: [mongoose@users.sourceforge.net: X upgrade policy]
* Terry 'Mongoose' Hendrix II <mongoose@users.sourceforge.net> [001211 23:29]:
> I told the X people months ago not to force out utah - that's why I'm
> pissed off. An overnight upgrade of gtk shouldn't break my x server. I
> also think hiding behind the debian stand-by "it's not even supposed to
> work" is why packages are always broken - no one cares.
Why *should* XF86 support Utah? SGI donated GLX, PI integrated it,
MetroX donated code to load drivers as modules at run time, the kernel
supports the AGPGART driver needed for this new GLX stuff...
Don't get me wrong -- the nice people doing the Utah-GLX broke important
ground, but trying to support it in 4.0 doesn't seem productive to me.
Trying to get Debian to support something upstream doesn't support seems
even less productive.
And as for broken packages, if one *really* wishes to avoid this
situation, one will run one of the stable releases. If I had a company,
with important servers, they would all run stable.
For a home machine, I am perfectly willing to wonder why on earth
something broke, and I even find a level of fun in tracking it down --
so I run unstable. If you don't fit this description, then you have the
choice of running stable. *Those* packages *do* work, as evidenced by
the large number of people running Debian.
No, I've never heard the "it's not even supposed to work" line by anyone
other than myself -- and that once was in relation to someone using the
woody packages (linked against glibc 2.2.94 or something like that)
being run on potato. (To this end, Charl P. Botha has been doing a good
job compiling the 4.0.1 source packages for potato. This is supposed to
work fine, and from his description (and user's accolades) it does work
fine.)
As for your recent problems -- welcome to the bleeding edge. When apt
offers to remove a bunch of packages for you, while installing a whole
bunch, it *does* ask if this is all right with you first. If you
discover after installing the new packages that it wasn't right for you,
backing out the new packages isn't too bad either. dpkg provides two
command line options to this effect, and apt, despite providing only one
option, it is usually the option people want. :)
Life on the bleeding edge sometimes means giving up on the past. If
there are parts of the past you didn't want to give up on, it is easily
within your abilities using apt to prevent this, or running a
distribution of Debian where the past is what you live in constantly. It
isn't horrible -- many people do that. I wouldn't consider anything else
for the machines where their continued stability matters.
Cheers. :)
--
``Oh Lord; Ooh you are so big; So absolutely huge; Gosh we're all
really impressed down here, I can tell you.''
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