Distinction without a difference [LWN.net]

Distinction without a difference

Posted Mar 3, 2005 6:26 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165)
Parent article: Debian vs. FreeBSD as a Web Serving Platform, Part 2

I don't understand why comments on Part 1 were not addressed.

It's trivial to run "unstable" packages on a "stable" Debian system, and get the same effect as running up-to-date ports on a BSD. (Not much of the "stable" library packages would remain untouched, of course, but that's all automatic.) It's a touch less easy, but still hardly more trouble than the equivalent using BSD ports, to use apt to build and install current releases of packages from testing or unstable against stable-version libraries.

In practice, most of us just run some snapshot of unstable on our desktop machines, occasionally updating the packages under more active development. It has been years since any significant problem arose, for me. Since server environments are much less complicated than desktops, it must be mainly superstition that keeps Debian "testing" off of most servers. Certainly anybody willing to run Fedora has nothing to fear from "testing".

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Distinction without a difference

Posted Mar 3, 2005 15:19 UTC (Thu) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

I concurr with you.

I run Debian stable with a sid chroot. I run stable with the one or two packages needing recent version (mainly spamassassin) running the chrooted version.

This stays completly painless to administer since you can upgrade stable and sid separatly, and sid cannot affect stable since it is chrooted. And with apt-listchanges, you know what you are up to when upgrading.

Distinction without a difference

Posted Mar 4, 2005 14:48 UTC (Fri) by arafel (subscriber, #18557) [Link]

testing is a bad choice for production servers because it receives no security updates.

Updates are generated for stable (by patching the version released at the time), and for unstable (by either patching the current version or including the new upstream); testing is on its own until the packages have migrated from unstable through to testing, which can take a few weeks.