On Wednesday 14 May 2003 04:53 pm, Björn Stenberg wrote: > What's worse, saying testing is not for public use means there is _no_ > place to get updates, since unstable is obviously not an option for end > users. This makes Debian the only linux distribution I know of that > completely eschews software updates between frozen releases (except for > security fixes).
Hmm. Funny how myself and every admin I know have only very minor issues with running unstable. What, pray tell, makes it such an 'obvious' non-option for end users? Well-timed unstable snapshots are often more 'stable' than commercial Linux releases, in my limited experience. Sure, every now and then a badly-broken package makes it in for a day or two. This seems to be far less harmful than the massive headache that treating 'testing' as a usable release seems to be causing. > The amount of backporting and apt-pinning going on suggests not all Debian > end users are content with yearly updates. A testing-like "middle ground" > release for end users definitely has a place in the Debian universe. I do like the sound of this, but saying it has a place and actually making it happen are very different things. There seems to be a lot of the former, and little of the latter - perhaps because unstable actually works just fine for the majority of people actually working on it? Just a guess, from my limited perspective. - Keegan
