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Why people don't test development distributionsWhy people don't test development distributionsPosted Jul 7, 2009 16:57 UTC (Tue) by joey (subscriber, #328)Parent article: Why people don't test development distributions Reading the article, I can't help but think Jon is generalizing from one development distribution and reaching some not so general conclusions, although there's good stuff in there too. (I'm looking forward to btrfs rollbacks..) My ancedote: I've run Debian unstable on all my servers and desktops for 10+ years, and only 3 times have I had breakage on the order of a broken libc or bad prelink. If I had chosen to run Debian testing, I'd have missed 2 of the breakages (testing was not available when the first happened).
Distributors would like to see wider testing of their development releases, but, as your editor's recent experience shows, there are limits to how wide this testing community can be expected to be. According to popcon, currently 30% of the subset of Debian users who choose to enable reporting use unstable or testing, not stable. If anything, some in Debian may wish to see less wide use of its development branches, but stable is not useful for lots of users.
Anybody who has worked with development distributions for any period of time knows that the early part of the distribution development cycle is when things are most likely to go wrong.This is certianly true, and a look at the debian-user mailing list will find similar warnings about using unstable after a release. Less so for the testing distribution, as the way testing's algorythm reacts to lots of churn and bugs in unstable is to stop updating many packages from unstable until the churn quiets down. Provide an indication of the state of the distribution. Many beaches are equipped with red flags which are posted when dangerous currents are present. Wouldn't it be nice if an apt-get upgrade could respond with a message like "the current threat condition is orange, you may want to reconsider"?As previously noted, apt-listbugs can do just that. It looks like about 1 in 10 users of unstable (or testing) uses apt-listbugs.
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Why people don't test development distributions Posted Jul 8, 2009 4:20 UTC (Wed) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]
Debian has a bad reputation because of the constant bickering on what "free" really means (but these discussions are useful in the long run, to everybody, not just to Debian!). And also because of the painful delays in its "stable" releases, but this is very misleading: Debian testing and unstable, as you say, are much more stable than the releases of many other distros.
I think the reason for Debian's success is the package management system: nothing is perfect but Debian's is as close as one can get (further improvements will require support from the OS/filesystem, such as snapshotting and rollbacks). The newer distros realise this and nearly all of them have chosen to use Debian's package management rather than RPM. If Fedora can make RPM+yum as robust and stable as dpkg+apt, then many problems may go away. But might it not be easier to just scrap RPM altogether and use dpkg+apt? Is it the NIH syndrome? Or do RPM/yum really offer something to Fedora that dpkg/apt don't?
Why people don't test development distributions Posted Jul 8, 2009 13:31 UTC (Wed) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]
dpkg+apt's main advantage is the existence of a large package pool (Debian) with little involvement by a commercial entity like Red Hat, and just static/problematic enough it's not succeeding as much as it could. So you can take the 80% done by Debian, add your 20% and get something dramatically better from the user point of view. You don't see any newer distro that chose dpkg+apt without forking the Debian Repository too.
If you try the same thing with the Fedora or Red Hat package pool you'll have an hard time proving your fork is better because there are so many public efforts pouring in the main branch (as Oracle, Mandriva, etc learnt). So it's not attractive for third-parties that want to make their own name. It takes behemmots like Intel or Oracle to try to outcompete Red Hat on its home turf nowadays.
If Ubuntu manages to raise the limit Debian-side the same way, you'll see third-parties looking elsewhere for a new base.
Why people don't test development distributions Posted Jul 9, 2009 1:15 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]
Well, the main advantage is that upgrades <i>just work</i>. Even across distros. I've gone from Knoppix to Debian to Ubuntu via apt-get dist-upgrade. Ubuntu has a graphical update tool that takes care of some subtle things during the upgrade process, but using command-line apt-get dist-upgrade will not break your system. Fedora, last I checked, still recommends backup+reinstall for upgrading.
Why people don't test development distributions Posted Jul 9, 2009 20:59 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]
I'm happy for you.
I'm sure people have the same stories for Fedora/RHEL/Centos derivatives (not recommended is different from you can make it work most of the time with little pain)
Though I doubt any distro ever shortlisted a package management system because it made easy to upgrade to a different distro.
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