Time to move from Red Hat to Debian?

Time to move from Red Hat to Debian?

Posted Nov 6, 2003 21:40 UTC (Thu) by evgeny (subscriber, #774)
In reply to: Time to move from Red Hat to Debian? by wookey
Parent article: Time to move from Red Hat to Debian?

> There is a fundamental tension between stability (=old) and being up-to-date.

Right, and this tension grows exponentially with the development cycle period. Two years is just too much. Probably it was tolerable a few years ago, but not now, with the fast-growing rate of free software packages (both in number and, as more developers join, feature additions per unit time).

> Debian at least lets you choose.

It lets me choose only between the two limit cases. I want a smoother function ;-)

> In practice security updates happen for unstable nearly as fast as they
> do for stable. They can happen for testing very slowly indeed as they
> just percolate down from unstable and that can take a while. This is
> important for those thinking they'll compromise between stable(old) and
> unstable(new) (and thus pick testing) - testing is a bad idea for a
> net-facing machine.

I realized it, too. But doesn't it defeat the whole idea of "testing" if many potential testers are effectively discouraged from testing (sic!) of server-level networked apps? And which machine is not net-facing nowadays?

> What I do is use the backports apt repositories maintained by some Debian
> developers to solve exactly this problem. These provide quickly-updated
> packages for stable in a reasonably consistent form - apt-get.org lists
> the repositories. This works for me. I'd like to see the process made
> more official at some point - it probably will be one day.

Yes, hopefully.

---

(Log in to post comments)