On Sun, Jan 14, 2007 at 02:03:57PM +0100, Michael Prokop wrote:
- Marc Haber mh+grml@zugschlus.de [20070113 14:15]:
On Mon, Jan 08, 2007 at 06:01:31PM -0700, s. keeling wrote:
[Debian Testing]
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.
Especially as Debian testing does not get real security-support. :( That's not really relevant for workstations for me, but straight before a new stable release is available that's an important point - at least for me.
There is some kind of Security Support for Debian testing, by means of the testing security team. Unfortunately, they're missing a lot of the transparency I'd like to see from a security team, but that's nothing new for Debian. I plan to blog about this in the near future once I find the time.
Unfortunately, even stable security support has been somewhat deteriorating since the sarge release, I hate to say. Especially in the past few months, in more than one case a security fix has reached testing by means of a normal unstable maintainer upload and normal testing migration before the stable security team issued the fix for stable. In theory, stable security could be much faster than a maintainer upload since the stable security team has access to embargoed vulnerability reports, which the normal maintainer does not have. This is all quite disappointing :-(
Stable is the best place for a newbie to be.
"If it works" (the "brand new hardware problem")
Yes, Debian needs to address this.
and if the newbie does not need support from upstream (see my other mail for more details).
This is an issue, yes.
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.
Yes, at least regarding bug reports for package maintainers. ;) But newbies can often locate problems in software because they lack developer's "business blindness" (Betriebsblindheit). At least isolating bugs is usually possible even with newbies, especially if they have support on their side (instant messaging, irc,...).
If you have a quick means of communications, things can work, but debugging via E-Mail with a newbie is a useless waste of time.
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.
The package freeze for Debian etch took place a few weeks ago. The unstable pool is "moving [nearly] as usual"
NACK. We did not have any library transitions for months, and new upstream versions are being withheld.
and I don't notice any serious problems - and don't really expect to find any when etch is out. :)
I remember the PAM breakage where login to an unstable system became impossible. Without grml, I would have been in serious trouble back then.
Greetings Marc