On Sun, Feb 26, 2006 at 11:01:15PM +0100, Joe wrote:
Isn’t Debian notorious for taking a really long time to package and
release new software?
Yes, but that’s a good thing 
Debian values “stability” much higher than being on the cutting edge.
What do you want your production server environment to be? Stable, or
full of features? You can’t have both … if you think you can, you
have a different definition of “stable” to me … “stable” doesn’t just
mean “it works all the time”, it means “predictable and reliable”.
Debian provide their own security patches for every package that is
accepted into the stable distribution - therefore they don’t like much
change. Where a package upstream author might address a security problem
by saying “just use the latest version, it has more features too”,
Debian say “we’ll fix the old version; no new features will be added”.
But the “stable” distribution isn’t the only part of Debian - there are
other repositories with more advanced versions; they’re just not
supported by the security team. Many people run Debian with “testing” or
“unstable” releases (which are often stable enough for production
purposes, but there are no promises).
Sometimes Debian version names cause confusion - stable/testing/unstable
are role names, they each have a version number and version name as
well. The current stable distribution is Sarge, 3.1. The current testing
version is called Etch. Seeing as all the version names are taken from
Toy Story, you won’t be surprised to know that the unstable distribution
is always called Sid
On a stable Debian machine, I really dislike building anything from
source, because I won’t be able to get “just” security patches, and I’ll
probably forget to update it anyway. I also don’t like installing
software from other helpful repositories, because I don’t know for sure
that they are providing decent security patching, either.
Where I need stability, but more up-to-date software, I tend to go for
one of the Debian derivitives - Ubuntu is my primary choice. Ubuntu’s
“stable” distribution has fewer packages than Debian (but the choice
seems to be about right), and they version upgrade every six months.
This makes it much closer to “stable and cutting-edge” …
-jim
