begin David Wright quotation: > > I am certainly not an advanced Debian package manager, but I am an > incredibly advanced Unix user by any measure. I think it's a little > disingenuous to claim that people like me shouldn't be using unstable.
I can't speak for anybody else, but every time I've ever told anyone they shouldn't use unstable, it's been after it made their system unstable, they haven't known what to do, and they've demonstrated by the character of their questions that they just expected everything to work and don't know what to do about finding their own answers. IMNERHO, unstable is for people who don't need their stuff to work, and can fix it themselves if it breaks. I'm a professional UNIX administrator, I've been using Linux since 1995 in production environments, and I won't even use unstable. Why? Because I don't want to fix broken code. The folks who do can and should use unstable. > My complaint wasn't that a particular package was broken, but that the > package management system could get into a state where one can neither > finish a package installation nor remove the package. And you were presented with methods of fixing that. It's a partially manual process. That happens, with unstable. It happens occasionally with testing, but not near as often. There is usually more than one way to fix it. BTW, it can happen with RedHat, too, and it's a bitch to fix there, too. It also happens with the Solaris and HP/UX packaging systems, and is hard to fix; and it happens with Windows, and is sometimes damn near IMPOSSIBLE to fix there. At least with Debian it's always a prerm or postrm SCRIPT, not a binary. With Windows you're often dealing with a binary. As for testing, you have a point; things there should be expected to get fixed quickly. However, they shouldn't be expected to be stable; that's what stable is for. Is stable out of date? Yes. But it's pretty damn stable. At this point, testing is pretty stable too; that's why it's about to become "stable". IMNERHO. -- Shawn McMahon | McMahon's Laws of Linux support: http://www.eiv.com | 1) There's more than one way to do it AIM: spmcmahonfedex, smcmahoneiv | 2) Somebody thinks your way is wrong
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