Andy Smith (12025-01-18): > One particular consequence of this process of making a stable release is > that generally no new features will ever come to the packages in it.
No new *features* is not the point of Debian stable, though, only a side effect. The point is: no changes in behavior. When you upgrade to a new version of a program, maybe you need to replace “whitelist” by “allowlist” because somebody had their fifteen minutes of celebrity by pointing it is problematic, otherwise it will not start. Or maybe the program you were running in a crontab will suddenly start asking for a confirmation interactively. Or maybe -D used to mean to not delete all the files and now, for consistency it means to delete all the files. When running Debian stable, you can trust the distribution it will not happen: you can upgrade, your scripts will not stop working, your config files will not need updating. Only need to schedule for unexpected software breakage once every two to five years. Regards, -- Nicolas George
