How stable is Debian Unstable?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 03:16:58PM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> Sounds scary.  Do you have to infer that you are in a time of high
> sunspot activity, or do you get some kind of notice that an
> inattentive ordinary user might pick up on?

Well when you see apt-get say it will remove 200 packages, usually that
is a good time to hit the 'n' button when it asks if you want to continue.

I believe debian-planet.org has status notices on major transitions.
Major transitions being things like: New major version of perl, new major
version of xorg, new major version of gnome, new major version of kde,
new major version of python.

They are not very common though.

> It sounds as if you are aware enough that you can avoid or work
> through problems.  It would be nice if users were shielded from this
> kind of trouble.  I don't generally remember such problems with either
> Fedora or Ubuntu (distro's possibly comparable to debian unstable)

Well there is the side project of debian CUT.  That is a version of
testing that is manually protected from transition breakage.  Now quite
as up to date as unstable but pretty good.  I haven't used it.  CUT stands
for "Continusly Usable Testing".  Check cut.debian.net for any status
of the side project.  I believe Mint Linux Debian Edition is essentially
Debian CUT.  Certainly very stable and much more up to date than debian
stable.  Very polished actually.

> Interesting.
> 
> On Ubuntu, I use "update-manager" (a GUI thing) for
> updates; once in a while, I'll use "apt-get update & upgrade" (mostly
> when I ssh in).
> 
> For adding packages, I've tried but not liked the "Ubuntu Software
> Center".  I usually use Synaptic because it lets me explore a bit (but
> it is clunky).  I use "apt-get install" if I know exactly what I want.
> 
> I don't understand what aptitude is about and haven't been motivated
> to find out.  The fact that there is a difference in dependency
> handling between apt-get and aptitude is a bit scary.

aptitude is curses based and lets you search and such.  It also lets you
resolve conflicts interactively, although not necesarily user friendly
manner.

You can replace apt-get with aptitude as a command line tool, although
rather than tell you about conflicts aptitude will offer possible
resolutions.

aptitude update, aptitude upgrade, etc, all work.

> Note: I don't invest a lot into Ubuntu, I let the distro drive me
> where it wants.
> 
> Impression: Ubuntu has a lot of users and they trip over a high
> percentage of problems that I hit, so often google finds a solution
> for me.  But if the problem is deep, Red Hat's ecosystem feels better
> at solving it.  Guess: Debian might well be better still (but fixes
> might not flow to stable at an observable rate).

Well stable rarely needs fixes because it is tested to death before
being released.  Security fixes go in quite quickly.

> I use Gnome 3 because I'm not interested in investing in that fight.
> But I'm certainly not in love with Gnome 3 or Unity.

gnome 3 disagreed with my very fundamental requirements of a window
manager.  That makes it not even an option to use.  I don't expect much,
and gnome failed to meet even those needs.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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