Packaging systems (was: What about post-installfest support?)

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, May 10, 2005 at 01:21:20AM -0400, CLIFFORD ILKAY wrote:
> Agreed, but it does not stop the ignorant or partisans from trying. I have had 
> Debian based systems but saw no advantage over Mandrake but several 
> disadvantages, one being that "unstable" is where I needed to be to have the 
> versions of software I needed but I am not comfortable running "unstable" for 
> production machines as the level of testing, by definition, is not as high as 
> it would be for stable, which tends to have geriatric versions of most 
> things.

My experience has told me Debian unstable often has at least as much
testing as many other distributions have put into their release
versions.  Who other than Debian really tends to have thousands of
active testers running their development version and filing lots of bug
reports?  I imagine something like Gentoo and ubuntu and such also have
lots of people running their development stuff, but they also seem to
release things as 'stable' much earlier than Debian is wiling to,
although Debian has soo many architectures to make things work on before
they are satisfied.

Certainly Debian testing is quite reliable for running some types of
production systems.  I would be perfectly happy running Debian testing
in production (and do for fileservers) and would be unhappy if I had to
go back and try that with redhat release versions again.

Lennart Sorensen
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