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Well, we keep an eye on what gets pulled in when installing from non-default repos. It hasn't yet ever happened that pulling in a small, single package from Deb

Well, we keep an eye on what gets pulled in when installing from non-default repos. It hasn't yet ever happened that pulling in a small, single package from Debian unstable has overrode too many Debian stable packages, only the ones related to it. There's a lot of difference between "unstable" and "Debian unstable". The latter is actually quite stable (which may be why Ubuntu feels safe enough to build on it). Breaking libc is a major step, and Debian wouldn't take such a step lightly. It rarely happens even with rolling release distros – and in the case of Debian – the true rolling, unstable distro is Debian testing. Before such a things rolls into Debian unstable, we've already received ample notice. ---- > which have had fun bugs in the past like ... I think those were just bugs. They didn't happen because they were in unstable, and even stable has had nasty bugs.

0x0 11y ago
My experience has been that many packages in unstable tend to get a Depends: on an unstable-only libc6, and effectively require a nearly full dist-upgrade to be installable, after a while. At least it was like this a few major versions back, maybe it's less brutal on jessie at the moment.
- pritambaral 11y ago
  Eventually, Debian stable becomes too old, and Debian unstable keeps getting farther and farther from it. We will eventually move to something newer, maybe the latest Ubuntu LTS. It's always a tradeoff between stability and freshness, which is subjective and varies from sysadmin to sysadmin. Worst case scenario: we have to build newer packages ourselves on top of an old, stable repo. That is also not too hard for us. ---- We do have one server running Arch though; we run every service on it that we have in production and some more, and less effort has gone into to it than any of our production servers individually. I think that's primarily because packaging for Arch is just so simple.

0x0 11y ago

My experience has been that many packages in unstable tend to get a Depends: on an unstable-only libc6, and effectively require a nearly full dist-upgrade to be installable, after a while. At least it was like this a few major versions back, maybe it's less brutal on jessie at the moment.

pritambaral 11y ago
Eventually, Debian stable becomes too old, and Debian unstable keeps getting farther and farther from it. We will eventually move to something newer, maybe the latest Ubuntu LTS. It's always a tradeoff between stability and freshness, which is subjective and varies from sysadmin to sysadmin. Worst case scenario: we have to build newer packages ourselves on top of an old, stable repo. That is also not too hard for us. ---- We do have one server running Arch though; we run every service on it that we have in production and some more, and less effort has gone into to it than any of our production servers individually. I think that's primarily because packaging for Arch is just so simple.