Brian Nelson wrote:
My experience of late has been contrary to what you say.Tom Allison <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:This will probably get me ejected from the planet or accused of not understanding how Debian works, but here goes. There has been a long standing "bitch" by some that Debian is so vary slow to update their base system. Personally I stand entirely behind the philosophies of making stable really stable and releasing updates when they are ready. I would not want anything to interfere with this as I believe it to be one of the greatest assets of Debian. But... I recently got burned a few times when I would skip an update to testing. There are some dependency problems I ran into where I had to jump to unstable in order to get all the right versions of the right software. And some of them were less stable than others.[snip rest of explanation] However, you proposed any solution to the above problem; namely, that packages in unstable tend to depend explicitly on versions of other packages that are only in unstable. This makes it quite difficult to mix packages between unstable, testing, and stable. Yes, you can recompile packages, but compiling software against older libraries will likely uncover a lot of bugs that have already been fixed in newer versions of the libraries and no one will want to deal with. Inevitably, I think an implementation of the system you're proposing would be less stable than any of Debian's current distributions. Or, if you intend to ensure that a package and all of its dependencies are "stable enough" before you will use it, then you're just reinventing the testing distribution.
I have testing packages that required unstable installations or unstable installations that were dependent upon testing packages and were incapable of being compatable with their counterpart unstable packages.
They have definitely been mixed. If I run into it again, I'll post it in detail.
The only suggestion regarding "stable enough", as you put it (and reasonably so) is to cap the age that you consider seeing a package in testing if you are using a apt_preferences configuration which supports both stable and testing.
This would provide some increase of exposure to the testing packages prior to their roll-over into stable.
--
An atom-blaster is a good weapon, but it can point both ways.
-- Isaac Asimov
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