Significant change in Mandrake Linux Development Process [LWN.net]

Significant change in Mandrake Linux Development Process

Posted Feb 4, 2004 13:15 UTC (Wed) by hingo (subscriber, #14792)
In reply to: Significant change in Mandrake Linux Development Process by coriordan
Parent article: Significant change in Mandrake Linux Development Process

I think your discussing a theory that has been disproved long ago.

I actually don't think we can truly compare Debians process with this one. With Debian, testing is a slightly more stable version of unstable and the stable thing is in it's own universe. With Mandrake, the community edition will be a slightly rougher version of the Official edition while Cooker will be only a developers toy. And let's repeat the fact that Mandrake Community is a supported release, that Debian testing is not. So really this is more like Debian's system upside down, Debian has two unstable versions, Mandrake two stable versions.

But I see what you might be saying, that if there are people who are willing to run Debians testing and even unstable, there should be no shortage of people running Mandrake Community.

Other than that, if nobody runs Debian stable (and I sure don't since I run mdk:-), why does it exist at all?

henrik

(Log in to post comments)

Significant change in Mandrake Linux Development Process

Posted Feb 4, 2004 15:35 UTC (Wed) by coriordan (subscriber, #7544) [Link]

This gets messy. Debian actually has 4 package categories now. ("experimental" being the fourth)

There isn't a whole "experimental" distribution though, it's more like a testing area or a pre-unstable category for individual packages or groups of packages. This change happened in 2003.

So now, "unstable" is for packages that are known to work, so "unstable" is tested and quite stable, much like Mandrake "Community", except that "unstable" isn't officially supported (but it is supported by it's package maintainers).

"testing" is like Mandrake "Official" and *is* supported AFAIK. (security updates etc.)

"stable" is for boxes that you intend to install on the moon.

So 99% of users can ignore "experimental" and "stable". Newbies or people that need very high reliability should choose "testing", for everyone else "unstable" is best.

Mandrakes system improves on Debian in one aspect: they've decided not to bother supporting moon based installations.

Significant change in Mandrake Linux Development Process

Posted Feb 6, 2004 11:03 UTC (Fri) by hingo (subscriber, #14792) [Link]

Ok, thanks for the update. I used to follow Debian rather closely once, but it seems I've
let my interests in that direction fade a little in the last year. From next week on I will
again be administering a Debian box, the current plan is to go with the
"moon-distribution" :-)

henrik