LWN.net Logo

Debian mix and match, long term support

Debian mix and match, long term support

Posted Oct 19, 2008 0:02 UTC (Sun) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458)
In reply to: Fedora and long term support by drag
Parent article: Fedora and long term support

That is a lot of work for the user of such a mongrel... and the idea of using a distribution is precisely to avoid such labor-intensive setups. Besides, if you want rock-solid stability, you won't get any guarantee for such a mix-and-match setup.

On the distribution side, keeping stuff backward compatible (in a fashion) for who knows how long is a resource drain that I'd prefer see spent on moving forward.


(Log in to post comments)

Debian mix and match, long term support

Posted Oct 19, 2008 20:51 UTC (Sun) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Beleive me.. Maintaining a working 'testing' distribution is much much much easier then maintaining a latest Fedora setup.

The way things work the packages are designed to work like this. In fact doing what I described works better then trying to be a 'pure' testing user. If you 'pin' packages so that you tell the OS to prefer 'testing' over 'unstable' but allow you to install 'unstable' packages then you avoid a lot of pitfalls that go along with package management.

-------------------------

And back porting newer packages from testing to stable, by recompiling packages from source packages allows you to use a stable distribution, but selectively upgrade the specific peices of software you need that may be too outdated for what you need. For example: if your tying to run a PHP website you downloaded off the net, but the mysql PHP packages from Debian stable are not new enough then it's easy to selectively upgrade those specific packages you need.

-------------------------

Basically: If you think this sort of thing is very hard to run and maintain then you have not done it.

Copyright © 2012, Eklektix, Inc.
Comments and public postings are copyrighted by their creators.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds