>>>>> "EW" == Ed W <li...@wildgooses.com> writes:
EW> But later in your email you imply that you are compiling your
EW> own kernel already?
No, I don't, I'm just going to do it in order to test current aufs.
EW> I do get that it's an interesting creative tension to choose
EW> between latest and greatest vs old and tested, but it doesn't
EW> seem entirely obvious that either is trouble free?
Of course neither is trouble free. The difference is that with (Debian
or whatever) stable you handle all the bugs at once and then can get the
system running almost untouched until the next stable release. With
(Debian or whatever) newest you get fixes of (some) old bugs, new
features, but also new incompatibilities and bugs -- and this requires
continuous attention. There is basically nothing wrong with either of
the approaches (I combine them).
(An extreme case I've experienced was when I was student and tried to
persuade the faculty Unix administrators to upgrade the five years old
Emacs installation. The problem was with some faculty staff members who
absolutely didn't like to change anything about their Emacs habits and
configuration. After much negotiations we ended up with two Emacs
installations: One current and another one being the old version to be
retained forever to keep some people content.)
EW> Git, et al, has started to change this mentality a bit though.
EW> Now we see a lot more projects doing a release, forking and then
EW> continuing to maintain a backport of fixes to the older
EW> versions.
This definitely makes some things easier. Especially with security
fixes.
EW> Perhaps in time this will lead to the Debian style philosophy
EW> working much better?
IMHO the Debian style works quite well (better than anything else I
tried). The big tension between stable and unstable was successfully
solved by introducing testing and later experimental, volatile and
backports. This not only helps users but it also makes management of
such a big distribution much easier.
Again, the problem with aufs, VServer, etc. is their rejection from
inclusion into the official kernel -- it's hard to argue against "our
primary focus is packaging the official kernel and supporting the
official features".
EW> in gentoo you can just do something like emerge vserver-sources
EW> and it pulls down all the patches, builds your kernel and off
EW> you go - presumably Debian, etc have some similar kernel build
EW> scripts to make it easy to build kernels?)
I don't know how it works nowadays, I must look at it.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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
