[PLUG] No more Red Hat ...

[Jeff Schwaber]

On Thu, 2003-10-02 at 01:15, Brent Rieck wrote:
> Paul Johnson wrote:
> > Keith Lofstrom wrote:
> > > Debian-stable seems to be built like a tank in an age of aircraft.
> > 
> > Stable is maintained for the sake of people who need absolute
>  > stability and new users, unstable is more geared towards the
> > lunatic fringe.
> 
> Is there a Debian that's not old and crusty but also not "geared towards 
> the lunatic fringe"?

Yes. The answer, as some have said, is testing. 

Testing was introduced a few years ago with the intent of providing a
step between unstable and stable. There were no plans, as far as I know,
for it to go away. There will be a frozen (and there has never before
been a frozen and a testing, but there will be now) because testing was
introduced with the intention of providing users who didn't want to
trust unstable with a little testing.

If you want to know what it actually is, here's the current standard:
unstable is where the developers put updates and new packages. Testing
is anything that was in unstable for two weeks and passed the build
system in that time. So testing is two weeks behind unstable. Which is
usually enough.

There is a movement to use experimental more, so code snapshots, things
which are truly the bleeding edge, will more and more be put into
experimental (hopefully), and there is no automatic method for moving
from experimental to unstable.

With that said, I use unstable, generally. Sometimes when you apt-get
update && apt-get dist-upgrade, you'll get caught in a bad place for a
little while. But most of the time, you don't. 

Now, if only someone would rewrite apt-get to allow it to rollback
previous actions. If anyone else is interested in this project, tell me
and maybe we could actually do it. I just don't have the energy to do it
myself.

Jeff