A constantly usable testing distribution for Debian [LWN.net]

A constantly usable testing distribution for Debian

Posted Sep 22, 2010 21:24 UTC (Wed) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

I only stopped doing so earlier this year. I can't remember what was annoying me enough to cause me to do so, however.

A constantly usable testing distribution for Debian

Posted Sep 22, 2010 21:41 UTC (Wed) by paravoid (subscriber, #32869) [Link]

Are you really asking that? Several people (and companies) do, on hundreds of thousands of machines.

A constantly usable testing distribution for Debian

Posted Sep 22, 2010 21:46 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

yes they do, especially on servers.

they don't always stick to only the versions of the packages supplied by Debian though.

I run debian on a few hundred systems, but there are a half dozen or so packages that I consider critical and run more up-to-date versions of (the kernel being one of them)

A constantly usable testing distribution for Debian

Posted Sep 22, 2010 22:31 UTC (Wed) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (1 responses)

> Does anyone run Debian "stable"?

If not, who would run Redhat?

A constantly usable testing distribution for Debian

Posted Sep 23, 2010 12:37 UTC (Thu) by jengelh (guest, #33263) [Link]

Over my dead body! :-D (Seriously, RHEL has already beaten Debian stable in terms of outdatedness.)

A constantly usable testing distribution for Debian

Posted Sep 22, 2010 22:54 UTC (Wed) by copsewood (subscriber, #199) [Link]

I run Debian stable on a cheap virtual machine server and have done so for several years, achieving around 99.9% uptime ( perhaps 3-4 hours downtime per year, and nearly all of this downtime is planned in advance). Not bad for a £15/month server.

A constantly usable testing distribution for Debian

Posted Sep 23, 2010 9:45 UTC (Thu) by algernon (guest, #11573) [Link]

I run stable on all my servers - for most of the time anyway. I usually start to switch my servers one by one to testing halfway through freezes, though.

A constantly usable testing distribution for Debian

Posted Sep 23, 2010 13:34 UTC (Thu) by Seegras (guest, #20463) [Link] (1 responses)

On servers. A lot of servers. Everything else (well yes, everything including RedHat, SuSE, *BSD, Solaris and of course #@!dows, except maybe Ubuntu LTS) is just a nuisance. You want them to work, and you want them to have all the necessary security-patches, but you don't want to fuss over them every day.

Otherwise, on my workstation and notebook, I use "unstable".

A constantly usable testing distribution for Debian

Posted Sep 24, 2010 18:04 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]

A lot of people also want their desktop and notebook to work without fussing over them every day, so run Debian stable there too. I do. Once, I found I wanted some features that were too new to be in Stable, but I decided to wait a year rather than risk a maintenance headache.

Rackspace rents virtual machines running any of about a dozen Linux OSes. Stable is the only Debian option it offers.

A constantly usable testing distribution for Debian

Posted Sep 23, 2010 21:21 UTC (Thu) by oak (guest, #2786) [Link]

Yes, on my desktop. At home and at work.

On my home laptop I run Debian old-stable[1] as the newer SW in Debian stable was memory usage wise too bloated for it.

[1] Note: its PCMCIA network card broke before Lenny became stable, so I don't worry about remote exploits and as I don't have any valuable data on it, I've pasted the password on its cover. I use it fairly rarely, mainly to do some C/Python coding & TeX writing when not at home. If somebody steals it, they are going to be responsible for recycling it. :-)

A constantly usable testing distribution for Debian

Posted Oct 6, 2010 0:55 UTC (Wed) by arpadapo (guest, #70478) [Link]

I do, for instance.

I have two computers, one is a desktop with Lenny (stable) and the other is a laptop with Squeeze (testing). However, there are several virtual machines on both, so I can actually use something newer whenever I want. Or when I have to care about security more than usual. (Good example is web browsing sometimes from Sid in VirtualBox, using the latest version of Firefox plus the necessary addons.)