On Mon, Jan 08, 2007 at 06:01:31PM -0700, s. keeling wrote:
Incoming from Michael Prokop:
I do not agree with:
stable --> ancient and full of bugs, but patched testing --> less ancient, less bugs unstable --> current and basically stable* (grml)
Nor do I. The Debian model is to produce stable with as few extant bugs possible. This is for the server market. Testing is just the next candidate for stable, once the release team signs off on it.
Right, agred.
That's also the best place for a newbie to be.
I disagree with that. Testing might be broken once upon a time, and when you're not able to fix this you don not belong on Testing.
Stable is the best place for a newbie to be. There is no Debian distributions for not knowledgeable newbies who want to have the latest software.
Helping to test testing helps Debian produce sable.
Yes, but bug reports from newbies are seldomly useful. Which is no offense to the newbie; isolating and reporting bugs is a form of art.
For those more adventurous or less sensitive to potential bugs, unstable is available. Unstable is expected to be buggy; that's where new features and fixes are implemented.
Testing is expected to be buggy as well.
That said, Debian's unstable is more stable than many distros' stable release.
Disagreed here. Especially in the period right after a stable release, unstable's breakages can be horrible.
Greetings Marc