> On 12-Mar-00, 10:56 (CST), Ron Farrer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I disagree! (surprise ;) I personally know of about ~4 people who were > > turned away from slink because GNOME and KDE were so OLD. I personally > > got around this by running potato (unstable then), but most people don't > > WANT to run unstable!
I really don't like unstable either, but I've pretty much abandoned the stable tree as too behind the times back when slink was nearing freeze. Believe it or not, unstable is actually very well mantained and is quite usable on production servers provided you beta test upgrades to ensure your critical packages don't break. If I ran a large cluster, personally I'd use tools like apt-move to create my own unstable tested mirror of Debian I could run upgrades off of. > Which is it? Do your friends want the newest bleeding edge stuff, or > do they want stability? They can't have both at the same time! Oh, I > see, the want the newest, but they want us to call it "stable". > > Sigh. > > Why is is this basic distinction so hard to explain to people? Testing > and reliability take time. During that time, new features are going to > show up in various parts of the system. Along with those new features > come compatibility and reliability problems. You can either have the new > features, or you can have a tested, stable, reliable *system*. *YOU* > *CAN'T* *HAVE* *BOTH*. I really don't see why they can't have both. The problem we have now, and it's going to get worse as more and more software ends up in Debian(you think we have a lot of packages now, wait two years), is that Debian is an all or nothing release. It's either 100% fully rock solid certified bug free or an unstable mass of mutating bugs and conflicts. Being 100% rock solid is great if you don't mind that your apache or mysql servers are 8 months out of date, but most workstations/servers don't need this level of stability. I mean really, I could care less if my server's gpm package gets broken. It's not going to effect productivity. Debian is eventually going to need to move away from the current stable->frozen->unstable release program, in 5 years trying to get 12,000 packages to work in perfect harmony is going to burn up too many man hours. Wasn't there a proposal of package pools awhile back? -Mark
