Ubuntu first time

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 08:42:22PM -0500, CLIFFORD ILKAY wrote:
> In that case, it's a very unfortunate choice of nomenclature. For
> the record, I only run Debian stable on production servers. I have
> tried to like Debian on my desktop but stable was too ancient and
> the fussy details of having a usable system, like having
> good-looking fonts, eluded me when I tried Debian but that was about
> five years ago when I had much less experience with Debian. I ran
> Mandriva for a long time and quite liked it but they seemed to lose
> their way. I eventually got to Kubuntu. It was OK, though there was
> more breakage than I liked with KDE. For KDE fans, it's not a great
> distro. I've ended up with Fedora running KDE and I'm quite happy
> with it. I might be happy with Debian unstable on my desktop, too,
> now that I'm much more comfortable with Debian.

The naming could probably have been chosen better.

In the stable release the idea is that things don't change.  Security
updates happen but package versions should be stable unless there is
a very good reason a security update should involve a new version (it
does occationally happen).

In unstable, packages change versions all the time.  This doesn't mean
the new packages are unstable, and in fact the idea of course is that
they should not be.  If they were it would make life difficult for all
other developers.  For things that are unsure, there is experimental
which is where packages go that need some testing and hence are not
necesarily safe to put in unstable yet.

testing is the area for the next stable release.  Packages don't go there
directly (except as exceptions during the freeze before release to fix
bugs without upgrading the version which the freeze is not supposed to
allow doing).  Normally packages go there automatically after something
like two weeks of being in unstable without any serious bugs filed
against them, and if moving them to testing doesn't break installing
other packages in any obvious way (this does still occationally happen
unfortunately during major transitions to new versions of gnome or kde
or perl.  The CUT idea is to make a testing that is more manually updated
to avoid such occational breaks in testing for installing some packages).

I personally run my desktop machines at home and work on unstable,
as well as my mythtv box (which I consider rather important, although
I think my wife considers it more important than me).  Servers at work run
stable.  Some people run their workstations on stable, some use testing.
Not sure if anyone other than me runs unstable.  None of these really
ever seem to have any issues (except the couple that have ATI graphics
cards.  Those seem to break every upgrade.  I think we replaced the
video cards in those by now though).  The router I develop software for
is based on stable with a few packages being newer versions.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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