On Sun, Sep 23, 2001 at 12:34:30PM -0400, Noah Meyerhans wrote: | On Sat, Sep 22, 2001 at 09:26:06PM -0700, Craig Dickson wrote: | > > Sure, stable is always well tested, but by the time it becomes available | > > the software included in it is so old that nobody wants to run it | > > anymore. | > | > Well, almost. I run Potato on machines that I don't generally want to log | > in on, but just set up and forget -- firewalls, proxies, that sort of | > thing. On workstations, I always run Sid. I have no use for Woody until | > it becomes the new stable release. | | Yes, I generally keep the really critical machines on stable. But in | potato's case I've even had to make exceptions because of how much | upstream development has been done since it was released. Kernel 2.4.x | is a big reason why. Personally, I find it unacceptable that 2.4.x has | been out for 9 months and we still don't have it in a release. An | OpenSSH that speaks version 2 of the SSH 2 protocol is another example. | These are packages that provide important functionality on the server | side as well as the client/workstation side, and have been available for | quite some time. Yet we don't support them and won't for several more | months. | | I believe we could have released a version of Debian containing OpenSSH | 2, Xfree86 4.x, and kernel 2.4.x by now had we decided that such a thing | was important. It's important to me, as I'm sure it is to a good number | of other Debian users and developers.
Sort of related to this -- I have a friend who is familiar with Unix and has Mandrake (and windows) currently installed on his fairly new machine. He wants to install Debian (he has used debian before, but was impressed with mandrake's installer) but the boot disks fail saying they can't find a hard drive. Mandrake runs fine and has kernel 2.4. I told him his IDE chipset probably has problems or (more likely) isn't supported in 2.2 but is in 2.4. I told him he should try the woody boot-floppies because they probably have kernel 2.4. It will be nice to have a new release to install directly. -D
