Debian slow to release (was: Novell to acquire Suse)

Ken D'Ambrosio ken at flyingtoasters.net
Tue Nov 4 10:50:23 EST 2003


> I've never been bothered by Debian's release cycle.  I run
> Debian/Testing on my desktop with Debian/Stable on my servers.  If I
> need a newer version of package on my stable servers, it's usually
> available from backports.org.

I know that this has all been hashed out before, but I'm going to throw my
hat (fedora?) into the ring: Debian's stable release -is- slow to come
out.  And for machines where stability is paramount -- basically,
production servers -- that's not a bad thing.  Occasionally, some feature
or other that's in "testing" is something I really want, and, with a
properly configured /etc/apt/ hierarchy, that's no problem.  Lastly, I,
too, run unstable on "my" machines (my home, work, and notebook
computers), and run into very few issues, and none that aren't resolvable
with some careful thinking -- which is worlds better than "dependency
Hell" that can occur with RPMs.  I -like- RPMs, I really do: they were the
first package manager that made sense to me, and the reason I finally
stopped using Slackware back in '97 or so.  But Debian's whole process --
and apt-get's ease-of-use -- is really, really hard to argue with.  I went
without using Debian until last year (not counting a brief brush with
Corel Linux), and now I regret having taken so long.  I've converted all
my servers from RH 7.3 to Debian stable, I have a local Debian repository
I rsync nightly -- which allows for _really_ fast net installs -- and so
forth and so on.  Will it bake brownies for me?  No.  Is it the easiest to
install, or the best at hardware detection?  Not even close.  What it is,
however, is a dream to maintain, patch, upgrade, add software to, etc.

$.02,

-Ken



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