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

[Robert Davies]

On Thursday 06 March 2003 14:53, you wrote:
>
> > 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.

One of the bugs was that upgrade from stable did not work!

> how does one upgrade redhat 7.1 to 8.0?

Generally you select update, it takes longer than a clean install, but the 
rpm distros DO support such changes.

> 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

It's not an issue to have the latest immediately, but after a while you find 
you cannot try application X, because it's writtein for say KDE 3.0, when you 
have 2.2, and such.

The stable system is great for servers, which tend to do a few jobs, and are 
not being used to try out things, the desktop is different.

Sometimes problems are solved, in newer kernel releases, and where it 
involves glibc and modutils updates it may not be a simple task of just 
comiling a new kernel.

> 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.

There are actually quite a few new features take a look at the list on 
www.kde.org, some simple things like adjusting browser timeouts help some ppl.

> install it. or apt-get dist-upgrade to testing or
> unstable. sarge/ testing is bottleknecked at the
> moment, but that will pass eventually.

That was something that folk ojbected to, and stopped when I was running 
Potatoe, claiming that making new packages available, somehow jeopardised the 
stability of their systems, and did not belong even as an option in stable.

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

Not really, I generally only install a new release after it's been out a 
month or two, for the main issues to be worked out.  Then you can always keep 
runing an older veersion for a few years, which behaves like 'stable' in 
effect, and upgrade things like the Desktop or X server when you want to or 
need to.

Rob