hw wrote:
> On Sat, 2022-12-10 at 23:05 -0600, David Wright wrote:
> > On Sun 11 Dec 2022 at 04:39:02 (+0100), hw wrote:
> > >
> > > How can Debian be so old?
> >
> > Maturity takes a little ageing.
>
> Then Debian needs to figure out how to become sufficiently mature
> without becoming outdated.
>
> How is this working anyway? Debian waits like 2 years or longer to
> become mature while the rest of the world has already moved on to more
> recent (versions of the same) software which has the bugs now fixed
> Debian is still struggling with? Or is Debian fixing the bugs in
> outdated versions in order to continue to use those for some reason?
Debian has stable releases. During the life of a stable release:
- programs are updated to fix bugs
- programs are updated to fix security issues
- a very small set of programs is updated because of high
volatility and demand for same:
https://packages.debian.org/bullseye-updates/
- otherwise, programs are not updated.
If an upstream project makes changes that fix bugs, and the bugs
are important, Debian will apply those changes if possible. If
the upstream project makes those bug-fix changes in a way which
changes other behaviors, Debian will avoid those changes.
That's "stable". You should be able to build on it without
having APIs or command line arguments change underneath you.
Meanwhile, a new stable version is being created, and exposed to
people who want to work on it in two releases:
unstable is not a real release. It's a repository to hold
packages that are being worked on. Every so often, someone
decides to rely on a package in unstable because it has a
feature that they want. They often regret it. unstable is for
developers, and it is not for their main machine.
testing is almost a real release, but it is never quite there
except in the months leading up to it being frozen as the new
stable. testing has packages that have met a minimal set of
criteria to be promoted out of unstable. It has not been tested,
it is in the process of testing.
If you can stand the occasional failure, a person might use
testing for some things. It's not a good idea to run production
on it.
-dsr-
