Forget Hardy

[Peter Garrett]

On Thu, 12 Jun 2008 11:23:48 -0500
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:

> Peter Garrett wrote:
> > 
> > As far as Debian needing to be a mix of stable, testing and unstable in
> > order to "work" - excuse me while I chuckle and chortle ... ;-)
> 
> Maybe you are lucky and have hardware old enough to have working drivers 
> in stable - or you don't need applications that are unstable in 
> unstable...  And you can laugh at people who aren't in that situation 
> and pretend that there aren't long intervals when hardly anyone is - 
> which is another reason for not using debian.

No, no - I wasn't chuckling at people who have problems of that kind :)
What I was chuckling about was the idea of mixing stable with unstable.
This is almost always a royal road to wrecking a Debian system.
Mixing *testing* and unstable can often work, though... for special
cases.

> >>> Someone will probably pull me up on this - but as far as I can see,
> >>> technically the Ubuntu way and the Debian way are practically
> >>> identical.
> >> Except when they aren't.
> > 
> > And that would be when, exactly? I was referring to the technical
> > aspects and particularly the packaging system. Perhaps you can
> > enlighten me...
> 
> When a new release is scheduled, and the schedule is followed on time, 
> keeping you out of that situation where you need to mix pieces from 
> stable and unstable.

See above - usually you would run testing, and only add what you really
needed from unstable. This is getting way off-topic for ubuntu-users
though, so I'll stop there.

[snip]
> And with debian and even more so, gentoo, that doesn't happen.  If you 
> don't learn about the quirks you won't have a working system.

Often true, agreed. Particularly in the case that you mentioned
regarding hardware issues.
[snip]
> The unique thing is the number of users that haven't had to learn how to 
> fix things the hard way.

Yes, there's some truth in that. In some ways that is unfortunate,
because the process of fixing things is an important part of learning
about Linux. Not that I'm advocating a return to the Bad Old Days ;-)

I'm actually producing a live CD that runs without X - precisely as a
tool for those who want to learn about the command line, and also as an
eye-opener for those who don't know how much can  be done
without all the point-and-click stuff :) See .sig...

-- 
Peter Garrett <peter.garrett at optusnet.com.au>

"INX Is Not X" - http://inx.maincontent.net
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