[PLUG] Debian 3.0, .deb application availability.

[Karl M. Hegbloom]

Eli Stair <eli.stair.lists at attbi.com> writes:

> I've been meaning to ask someone who uses it, perhaps you do...

8-) I'm ONE of the people to ask.  There's a growing number of PLUG
members using the Debian GNU toolkit these days.

> How is 3.0?  My last experience was with 2.2r2, which got hosed
> by an attempted Progeny upgrade.  It was still beta, I knew what
> I was getting into so I'm not complaining.

It was probably not really all that hosed.  You should have asked for
some assistance!  It likely could have been fixed with little trouble
and no data loss at all.

> My main complaint with Debian, and a sticking point with any
> package-based distro, is that it _seemed_ that popular (read: new)
> .debs were always months behind release of the software.  There
> wasn't enough community support behind packaging apps in .deb
> format, thus no resource equivalent to rpmfind.net.

In the "unstable" branch, the new upstream release is quite often
followed very shortly by a new Debian release.  When that does not
happen is when the new upstream release represents a major change that
makes the automatic upgrade process difficult, breaks peoples systems
(library upgrades, scripts break, etc.), or is considered too unstable
to use yet (though that's usually not the big one in "unstable" unless
the upstream software is still at the alpha or early beta release
status).

So, if you must live at the bleeding edge, just change your
sources.list to point to "unstable", or, put both stable and unstable
in there, and use the "man apt_preferences" mechanism to control what
you actually install.

The thing with distribution maintenance is that you don't want to
break a million computer systems out there on the net.  When they all
trust you to provide working software systems, that they don't have to
futz around with all day to get working (so they can get on with THEIR
job), you can't go and toss a brand new and untested software release
into the mix and just hope it works.  This is why there are several
branches -- stable (woody), testing (sarge), and unstable (sid).

> Has that aspect changed much?  Other than that issue I found it to
> be superb.

The more things stay the same, the more things change.  Debian
unstable is a moving target and always will be.  It is still superb,
of course.

-- 
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