I'm sorry guys. I know I promised to shut up but I just couldn't sit on my hands when I saw this from Ian Jackson:
>Why is a collection of packages that is continuously updated not "a >Product" ? You can download it all in one go Only then do you have a "Product". <or in dribs and drabs, >and if we are careful about what we update - as we should be - then it >will work regardless. The advantage to you is that you get a less >buggy system. I assume that the "we" who are carful, and should be, are the Debian developers, but could enclude us users. I can only say that my experience does not support the above view of what a Product is. While trying to build a system, dpkg changed enough to loose it's old database (rather than provide a conversion) and "forgot" that it had installed the base package. When I went to remidy that problem, the only version of the base package was a newer version than the one I had originaly installed, but I had no choice but to install it. The installation failed to reconfigure the system properly, leaving me without a working ppp connection in Linux. Although a fixed snapshot provides opportunity for buggy packages to hang around longer, it also allows the properly working ones to hang around longer also (before they get upgraded to something that has new bugs). This is especially critical reguarding the packages in the base directory. Thanks for your patience, Dale
