Debian GNU/Linux 3.0r4 released [LWN.net]

Debian GNU/Linux 3.0r4 released

Posted Jan 3, 2005 21:34 UTC (Mon) by jonth (subscriber, #4008)
In reply to: Debian GNU/Linux 3.0r4 released by imp
Parent article: Debian GNU/Linux 3.0r4 released

My own use case at home is a server, a firewall, a desktop PC and a laptop:

The server runs Debian Woody, and has never crashed in the 3 years I've had it running. It's been rebooted about 10 times, for one of three reasons: 1. a power cut, 2. a physical reloctation and 3. A kernel security update. In that time, it's had a nightly cron job running "apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade" to pick up security updates. This has never failed, either. The server provides NFS, IMAP, NIS, HTTP and NTP services, none of which have failed since they were started. In short, it's stable and I'm damn glad it's there. When sarge turns up, I'll upgrade, but until then, the server does exactly what it's supposed to do and that's fine by me. It does annoy me that the Debian project has such a slow release cycle, but it's the biggest distribution around and it's difficult to underestimate how hard it is to get a collection of 10000 packages in a state where every single one has no critical bugs outstanding on it on any of 10 ports.

The desktop and laptop PCs both use unstable. Every few days I update these manually, but only if all the dependencies resolve correctly - this simple precaution seems to avoid irreversible installation errors. These systems do get occasional bugs, but I've never had anything completely unusable - just the sort of bugs you'd expect in bleeding edge packages. Maybe once a month something like this happens.

Finally, the firewall. Here I use IPCop as I like the "one button" approach. I've never needed a particularly flexible firewall, so the off the shelf solution suits my needs.

What's my point? Well, there are a number of them.

1. "stable" really does serve a need: if you want a server that you know will be secure and rock-solid which provides a standard, basic set of services, then this is the thing for you.
2. "unstable" isn't unstable. In fact, in my experience, it's a lot better at being bang up to date and still stable than Fedora is (I've never tried Gentoo).
3. Debian's release cycle is too slow and the project probably does need a different process to speed this up.

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