On Sun, Dec 27, 2020 at 12:16:22PM +0000, Simon McVittie wrote:
>...
> Ubuntu might have some good ideas here: if I understand correctly,
> their inconsistent unstable-equivalent is not generally used (except by
> buildds), while their internally-consistent testing-equivalent is updated
> from their unstable-equivalent with a 0-day migration delay and *is*
> used by early adopters.
>
> In the world of non-Debian distributions that *only* produce a rolling
> release, my understanding is that Arch Linux is a bit like Ubuntu in this
> respect - new packages go into a suite that is not recommended for use,
> get a bit of QA/testing by their developers, and *then* go into the
> rolling release that users are advised to actually install.
I do see value in getting feedback from interactive users in unstable
before migration to testing, this does prevent some regressions from
entering testing. Personally I would even like to see the default 2 day
migrations we have now reverted to the original 10 day default.
We've had surprisingly few of the "libc6 is broken and the system does
not boot" or "postinst does 'rm -rf /${doesnotexist}'" kind of bugs in
recent years, but users of unstable should know what they are doing and
be prepared for any kind of breakage at any time when they use something
that is aptly named "unstable".
For many users a better solution might be to pin to testing with
automated upgrades, and only manually "apt-get -t unstable"
install/upgrade from unstable.
> smcv
cu
Adrian
