[BackupPC-users] Offtopic Distro Flamewars (was: Scalability?)

[Jules A. <ju...@pc...>]

Les Mikesell wrote:
> When people complain about
> Debian, someone always replies that you should expect things to
> break if you don't stick to the 'stable' release.  And that's
> always about 3 years behind what you want to run. 

Depends on whether you want to run bleeding edge "upstream wrote this on 
a 3AM pizza-and-jolt-cola binge last night" code, or "hasn't changed in 
three years because it's feature-complete, does exactly what you need it 
to, and just gets security updates occasionally" code.

For desktops, yeah #1 is often what you want, at least while the Linux 
desktop is still in its infancy. And "stable" can be three years behind 
the latest bleeding edge stuff, but only just before the next release 
happens. Sarge has lots of freshie goodness. Hopefully it will be 
released Q1 2005. Woody was first released in July 2002.

I think the existence of RedHat Enterprise is proof that some people 
(like a lot of working sysadmins, for example) find the idea of a system 
that changes *as little as possible* very attractive.

And yeah, you should occasionally expect things to break in testing and 
unstable, because they are appropriately named. But if you do find a 
problem and report it, I think you will be amazed at how quickly it gets 
fixed.

-- 
Jules Agee
System Administrator
Pacific Coast Feather Co.
ju...@pc...      x284