Re: Meta-cycles: 2-3 year major cycles for free software? (Here Be Dragons)

I hadn't realized that the continuum was so broad; that's what I get for not tracking RH for so long. It looks like my analogy was, indeed, over-simplified.

From your explanation, I'd say Debian Stable is probably a little behind RHEL5 for content, but has an update policy similar to RHEL3 -- they don't change anything unless it's security- or stability-related. Testing is somewhere between F9 and F10, and Unstable is somewhere between F10 and F11. The nice thing about using Testing is that it becomes Stable like magic, as long as you track by name ('lenny', say, instead of 'testing').

The great-something-grandparent post was pointing out that this same feature applies in Ubuntu -- you can move to a less stable release if you need extra features, and then end up back at a good level of stability before too long, with minimal effort, just by running your updates regularly. The 'granularity', as it were, is very good. It's a nice setup, at least in theory, but it really doesn't sound like others are terribly impressed with their release quality.