On 28/03/2011 01:08, Milan Zamazal wrote: > I've abandoned the ritual of compiling Linux myself about ten years ago > and I don't regret it. It was fun when I was a student, but later it > has become better to use the results of work of others and spend my > limited resources (nobody pays me for compiling the kernel) on more > useful things. I can understand other people enjoy it or have to do it > for some reasons, but this is not my case anymore.
But later in your email you imply that you are compiling your own kernel already? Did I misunderstand? > No, you have choice between using "stable", "testing" or "unstable". I > usually prefer "stable" last years as the "latest and greatest" breaks > something all the time. It typically takes less effort to find a way to > live with known bugs for a few years untouched than to solve new > problems every week. Pick a software project mailing list and search for "Debian". Seems like in most cases you see a big chunk of emails along the lines of: Q: I'm using Debian and some feature isn't working A: What version software are you on Q: I'm using version 0.1 that comes with Debian stable A: Current release is Version 5.7, your version is 25 years old. Upgrade and then come back and ask your question... I do get that it's an interesting creative tension to choose between latest and greatest vs old and tested, but it doesn't seem entirely obvious that either is trouble free? In fact I would tentatively offer an opinion that the Unix mindset is *generally* to push on and develop in HEAD, so that generally this is where all your bug fixes are found... As such the current status quo generally seems to be that most projects product a firehose of commits that are a mix of bug fixes and new features - really if you want bug fixes then you kind of have to take the new features as part of the same... Equally I would say that at the 40,000 foot view, software generally gets more "reliable" as it gets more mature, but obviously that's not completely true if you zoom back in to the point release level... Therefore in my opinion, latest and greatest is frequently (not always) less trouble than old+workarounds... Git, et al, has started to change this mentality a bit though. Now we see a lot more projects doing a release, forking and then continuing to maintain a backport of fixes to the older versions. Perhaps in time this will lead to the Debian style philosophy working much better? Personally I have gone for the "latest and greatest" philosophy and I would agree it creates some problems from time to time, but it suits my way of working better (not claiming it will suit everyone though) Good luck - thanks for sharing about LXC Oh, and just a point in the sand, but I have been following aufs/vserver(&grsec) for a little while now and I haven't seen a problem using all patches together for quite some? (I build mine manually, but in gentoo you can just do something like emerge vserver-sources and it pulls down all the patches, builds your kernel and off you go - presumably Debian, etc have some similar kernel build scripts to make it easy to build kernels?) Ed W ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Create and publish websites with WebMatrix Use the most popular FREE web apps or write code yourself; WebMatrix provides all the features you need to develop and publish your website. http://p.sf.net/sfu/ms-webmatrix-sf
