Debian... not too worried [LWN.net]

Debian... not too worried

Posted Dec 23, 2004 12:00 UTC (Thu) by alex (subscriber, #1355)
In reply to: Distributions in 2004 by evgeny
Parent article: Distributions in 2004

It would be nice for a new stable release but I do find for my servers the current stable is rock solid. Of course the one area I've had problems is with spam software but luckily backports.org allows me to have an upto date spamassasin with a known stable base.

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Debian... not too worried

Posted Dec 23, 2004 12:34 UTC (Thu) by evgeny (subscriber, #774) [Link]

Right, backports.org is of a great help. Typically, I end up with about a dozen entries from it in apt/sources.list. But, since backports.org is in no official way connected to Debian proper, you can never be sure (not at the level of the "stable" packages, at least) of security holes patched in time etc. Also, this misses the point of reviewing _distributions_.

The future of distributions?

Posted Dec 23, 2004 13:42 UTC (Thu) by alex (subscriber, #1355) [Link]

Sure, however I'm not sure if the current model of distributions is the best way to get what we want (upto date features with core system stability). Ideally I would like a distribution that maintained a stable core but I ran the latest of a particular packages stable series, preferably direct from the package source. Of course that does require a shift in the way upstream packages maintain their stable series - more like Debians policy of only fixing the security hole rather than upping everyone to the next stable version.

Of course it isn't an ideal world, look as the OpenSSH changes for privilage separation for an example of the conflicting requirments between upstream mainatainers and distributions.

There is still plenty of space for innovation in the way distributions are designed and managed. I wonder if we will see any on 2005?