Carl Fink wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 04, 2008 at 10:02:13AM -0400, Patrick Wiseman wrote:
>
>> So? I've been using testing for years, and have found it to be
>> remarkably stable - it's remarkable precisely because it IS 'testing'.
>> Sometimes (rarely) things break, but that's something I prefer to
>> live with so that I can have an up-to-date system. The current
>> 'stable' is relatively up to date, as it's fairly recent, but there
>> tends to be a long period between stable releases.
>
> And in fact, for (using a number I just pulled out of thin air) 90% of the
> time I've been using Debian, going back to Slink, Stable has been so
> obsolete as to be hard to use for anything but some servers.
As usually, it all depends on what you need. I run Etch on my
(relatively old) laptop and so far there have been only few packages
that I needed to upgrade to their "testing" version. For me it seems
like a good deal to have a base system that is not breaking randomly on
updates, and just upgrade a few user-level applications. I used to use
Debian testing for a long time, but I realized that it just consumes too
much time to repair things that suddenly break, especially if the
problems are related to drivers/Xorg (e.g., using an external display
with my laptop needed a lot of tweaking after various Xorg updates of
"testing", and it works perfectly, and continuously, since I switched to
Etch, albeit without the new "xrandr" features).
On the other hand, the number of "release-critical" bugs is currently
higher in Etch than in Lenny -- which is quite surprising. Of course, it
is partially because, as far as I understand, many bugs get resolved
upstream and the patches are not backported to the old versions of
applications in Etch. But it is probably not the only explanation, is it?
Best,
Michal
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