"Jesús M. Navarro" <jesus.nava...@undominio.net> writes: > But once you forget your expectancies and put yourself under the skin of > a newcomer, Sid breaks and sometimes breaks hard (no other thing should > be expected -in fact, I feel sometimes that Sid breaks "too little" > because due to the fact that so many people use it for practical > purposes package upgrades tend to be not as much aggressive as it could > be otherwise). A bit to a lessen extent the same can be said about > Testing.
I don't agree; I think it's very hard to say the same thing about testing. Yes, sid sometimes breaks hard, although I think if you've been running Linux for a few years the degree to which sid really breaks is somewhat exaggerated. I've never had something happen in sid that risked real data loss, for instance; I know we've had cases, but I think they've been really rare. I've had an unbootable system where I needed to boot from a rescue CD I think once, and a few cases where X didn't start until I rolled back some package upgrades. For breakage, that's not bad. But on testing, it's been rock-solid for me for years. It's not just somewhat less breakage. I think it's almost no breakage. Occasionally packages get stranded for a long time at back revs because of various migration problems, and once or twice I've had to pin something (usually because of non-free drivers like fglrx or nvidia that aren't really part of Debian), but it's an experience that I can comfortably recommend. I do think that it's hard to run Debian testing unless you have someone around who knows Linux enough to figure out what's going on with a package upgrade occasionally, but I think the same thing is true of running Ubuntu, Fedora, etc. That's more a problem with Linux on the desktop in general, and I don't think Debian is any worse off than others. (I'm also dubious it's really worse off than Windows either; it's just that more people know how to unwedge broken Windows systems enough to get them to limp along than know how to fix Linux systems.) > If anything Sid/Testing could be compared to a "rolling release" > distribution ala Gentoo or Arch but not to any "fast releasing" like > Fedora or Ubuntu. No, having run both, I honestly think Debian testing is a superior experience to Ubuntu. It gets packages roughly as fast, with some advantages both directions, but it's more reliable. Packages in Ubuntu universe break all the time, and worse, they release broken, and it can be harder with Ubuntu to temporarily install just that package from a newer release than it usually is with testing to temporarily install something from sid. > And even then their goals are different and as such the expectancies to > be created: Ubuntu, Fedora or Arch are *products* by themselves while > Sid/Testing are *tools* aimed to produce a product, which is Stable. Eh, sort of. I think you'll find that many package maintainers, such as myself, are pursuing both of those goals at the same time. > Forget that and you'll fastly find yourself in nasty places (i.e.: start > "selling" Sid as a "Fedora/Ubuntu, only better" and be ready to put on > your asbestos suit because users will start to yell each time it breaks > something -as it happens almost daily, and asking yourself "well, since > we can't risk Sid to be heavily broken sometimes, where do we develop > integration for Stable?"). *boggle*. Something breaking almost daily is *completely* alien to my experience even with running Debian unstable. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87sk3byafe....@windlord.stanford.edu
