Long time no see.....

[Collins Richey]

2009/11/28 Man-wai Chang <toylet at changmw.com>:
>> If you say so.  Testing stays more or less current and there's always
>> unstable.  OTOH, when you have a bunch of customers with Asterisk
>> servers who scream if their phones aren't working (because phones just
>> work), conservative and stable is good.
>>
>> I have some automated scripts that keep everything up to date, and
>> having a bunch of different machines complicates things, so I stick to
>> Debian.
>
> I think people should always trust the software developers. If you
> didn't, you should not have included it. Backporting is less than
> satisfactory.
>
> Does Debian really make it easy to use latest and hottest packages?
> Unstable?
>

Hmm! Latest and hottest packages? Not really.

I've been running Debian unstable (sidux) for a couple of years, but
unstable is fairly slow to adopt anything hot and untested. You would
need Debian experimental for that, and your customers would not be
very happy with that choice.

Examples: php 5.3 has been out for some time, but unstable is still at
5.2.11. It took many months for kde 4 to appear in unstable.

I'm not aware of any distro that is stable enough for general use that
offers "latest and hottest " packages. Either you are content with
dealing with frequent outages, or you step back to "fairly recent and
usable". Debian unstable (It's really quite stable. I've only
encountered a couple of glitches in 2 years.) is an excellent choice
in that category if you can live with frequent updates.

-- 
Collins Richey
     If you fill your heart with regrets of yesterday and the worries
     of tomorrow, you have no today to be thankful for.