[Nottingham] Debian devotion [was: OE Reply Fixer]

[Alex Tibbles]

<snip>

> > The difference with debian is that it is designed
> to be easily
> > upgradable from major version to major version via
> apt/deb, and the
> 
> But that feature is something that there was
> problems with for ppl moving to 
> Woody it was one of the issues that delayed Woody's
> release.
i thought it was woody's hideously large release
critical bug count. do you remember any details?
apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade always worked
for me.

how does one upgrade redhat 7.1 to 8.0?

> Fine but waiting 2 years for unstable to become
> stable, and to get reasonably 
> up to date software is not acceptable.  If you run
> unstable then you become 
> part of the 'Debian testing process'.
> 
> My problem was, I needed a 'Fresh' release, packages
> that had been tested 
> reasonably and passed from unstable, that would add
> new software, and major 
> releases of things like Destkops, which don't impact
> underlying server code.
i think that debian's biggest obstacle to 'power user'
adoption is that people go "ooh! it hasn't got version
x.y of blah-package like RedHat" and drop it. people
don't seem to realise that stable just works.

for real mainstream adoption i don't think this is a
problem - I read an interview with the people who run
Xandros Inc./whatever and they said that most people
(including corporate customer who actually will pay
for software that works - even if it's free) want
something that *just* works.

it's rare that there is a killer feature difference
between any two releases of a package - eg. when I
upgraded to KDE 3.1, i was very disappointed - there
was nothing new.

you need the newest packages when you need one feature
(eg. hardware support in a beta kernel). but why
should every user of the distro have to put up with
beta software that only a few people need.

if you need a newer package in debian then find a
back-port to stable (very common) of the package and
install it. or apt-get dist-upgrade to testing or
unstable. sarge/ testing is bottleknecked at the
moment, but that will pass eventually.

new software is not stable. debian simply offers a
broader range of answers to the stability/ features
trade-off than anyone else.

alex

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