In <slrnh85u4r.531....@laptop.sweetpig.dyndns.org>, S. Fishpaste wrote: >Well I was primarily wanting to stay with stable as this is an older > laptop and other than wanting an uptodate browser *always* I'd prefer to > use backports. Wonder why either backports or volatile don't carry the > latest versions of Iceweasel|Firefox. I thought that was the purpose of > those 2 sources.
Volatile is for software that fails to achieve its goal if it is not updated much more often than stable, such as anti-virus and anti-spam. The browsers that are part of stable still function (I use them). I believe FF was in volatile-sloppy for a while, and I would not object to it living there again. Backports is for any software has been released since stable that can run in the environment provided by stable (which generally means running on older libraries). The Mozilla products generally require a number of components to be incompatibly replaced with new versions, which can make them unsuitable for Backports. Sometimes backports of the Mozilla products to appear though. Sid is for software that the maintainer feels could be suitable for a Debian release. Generally, this is not VCS snapshots, alphas, or betas. It might also exclude some RCs. For the KDE project, it even excluded two releases of KDE 4. The software should have a maintainable API/ABI and be usable (as in, not crashy and contains enough features) for the majority of the users it targets. Experimental is for packages that are not suitable for Sid, for whatever reason. The packaging could be undergoing complex changes and may not install the majority of machines. The software itself might be unreleased by upstream, but upstream or the maintainer are eliciting feedback. In all cases, packages are only available as the packagers have time to build and upload them. Want more up-to-date packages? Get to work! -- Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. ,= ,-_-. =. b...@iguanasuicide.net ((_/)o o(\_)) ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy `-'(. .)`-' http://iguanasuicide.net/ \_/
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