> but the needs of system administrators are not the same as the needs of developers. That's why my development machine is on a rolling release, but my servers

> but the needs of system administrators are not the same as the needs of developers. That's why my development machine is on a rolling release, but my servers run Debian stable with as few out-of-repository extras as possible. As another code monkey-cum-sysadmin, I very much second this: my servers are Debian stable without non-free, and there's damn good reason for that. I can appreciate GP's argument, and I've been there, pulling down CL libraries for playing around on my development machines. But what GP leaves out is that more often than not, those distribution-external packages break, and if I was relying on them, I'd be left holding the bag. I do agree, there is a problem (that the LWN article goes into), and it definitely needs attention. Distributions might be able to handle newer ecosystems better. But for all the awesome whizbang packages of NPM, QuickLisp, etc, developers need to realize that sysadmins and especially distro maintainers have to look at the bigger picture. Maybe consider that if your software introduces breaking changes or needs security updates on a weekly basis, it isn't production ready.