Peter Hoist wrote: > I am enjoying Debian's testing branch as a reasonably stable and up-to-date > 'rolling' release
That's not what it is. > , and I have to say it satisfies all my desires, almost. > So the question is, why not cut a release branch every two years, and at > the same time keep the unstable/testing alive? Is it because debian > developers think it's too much work to reconcile the differences later, so > they prefer freezing? The thing is this: testing is not a rolling release. It is not a release. It is a process which will result in a release. Testing is the pile of packages that managed to stay 10 days in unstable without a new major bug, without making the system [more] uninstallable, and didn't fail to build for any release architecture. Eventually, work is done to make testing into a release. That process is a set of freezes over several months, which allows developers to see what needs to be fixed immediately. The final freeze produces a stable release. >From the wiki page: Compared to stable and unstable, next-stable testing has the worst security update speed. Don't prefer testing if security is a concern. Basically, you're getting lucky. You should not depend on it. -dsr-
