[buug] Setting up Debian

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Claude Rubinson (cmsclaud at arches.uga.edu):

>> But are you _sure_ you want to revert to 2.2/potato?  Hardly anyone uses
>> it, any more, because its versions are ultra-conservative to the point
>> of lunacy.  And 3.0/woody is NOT the unstable branch; it's the "testing"
>> branch, which has proven so extremely solid that it's exactly what's
>> lead to 2.2/potato having hardly anyone using it.
> 
> I'm not so sure how true this actually is.  

I have only limited experience running the testing branch on non-i386
architectures, but it's certainly proven to be true on i386.

> However, many (most?) Debian users that I've met in real life are
> running Potato. 

<shrug>  Most ones I've met _on-line_ long ago switched to testing.
And those tend to be the ones that matter to the development process.
Which was the point I was driving at:  potato is a lame duck.

Here's a proposition to consider:  How about ignoring "release" dates
for Debian, since they're almost entirely irrelevant?  Because of the
incremental nature of Debian's development process, there are in a
functional sense three real "releases":  stable, testing, and unstable.

They were "released" a long time back, and they'll never actually need
to be released again.  I.e., somebody several years ago might have
installed Debian when "stable" was v. 1.2/rex.  Time passed.  Once every
couple of weeks, he used apt-get to resynchronise.  His
/etc/apt/sources.list pointed to "stable", rather than branch name "rex". 
So, as times passed, his system smoothly and imperceptibly auto-upgraded
through 1.3/bo, 2.0/hamm, 2.1/slink, and 2.2/potato.  Today, he's
running a current version of 2.2/potato; two weeks ago, he was running a
slightly earlier set of potato packages.

The point, however, is that, from the user's perspective, _functionally_ 
speaking, he's installed exactly one distribution, Debian-stable, and
he's still using it.  It's merely improved gradually over the years. 

I get tired of clueless reporters and on-line pundits spilling virtual
ink over Debian's "release schedule", when anyone with clue one knows
it's almost utterly irrelevant.

-- 
Cheers,
Rick Moen                     Emacs is a decent operating system,
rick at linuxmafia.com           but it still lacks a good text editor.