Re: Quimby Upgrade

[Colin Walters <walters@cis.ohio-state.edu>]

Arcady Genkin <antipode@thpoon.com> writes:

> I'll challenge that 'up-to-date'.  If you run potato (which I do on
> my workstation), you'll be stuck with old versions of everythig
> ((x)emacs including), unless you want to compile from sources (which
> I do).  Of course, you can try compiling a source package from
> unstable, but that only works 50% of the time without having to
> upgrade `debhelper' and half of the system (including Perl).

Well, this is simply a tradeoff.  One of the advantages of Debian
style freeze-release cycles is that everything has been very well
tested and integrated.  You should never really have to install
incompatible versions of libraries, or for example.

But on the other hand, it does mean that some of the software is
pretty old.  But, one can't have everything...

Personally, I just use Debian stable for servers, and unstable for my
desktops, and it works pretty well.  Not that unstable can't be a bit
*too* bleeding edge sometimes...anyone using potato when it was
unstable remember the broken makedev package that caused all of one's
devices in /dev to disappear?  That was fun...