3 ms·

A lot of people have an irrational fear of Sid because it's called Unstable. And yet the use "rolling" distributions that often contains exactly the same softw

A lot of people have an irrational fear of Sid because it's called Unstable. And yet the use "rolling" distributions that often contains exactly the same software.

dv_dt 5y ago
I think many steer clear of sid because of the security policy: Please note that security updates for "unstable" distribution are not managed by the security team. Hence, "unstable" does not get security updates in a timely manner. [1] [1] https://www.debian.org/releases/sid/ https://www.debian.org/releases/sid/
- goodpoint 5y ago
  This phrasing is very misleading. Sid/Unstable and Testing track upstream releases. If an upstream developer releases a new version to fix a vulnerability, Sid gets the upstream fix just like other rolling distro. If a version in Testing has a vulnerability and Testing entered a pre-release freeze the fix gets backported. If a version in Stable has a vulnerability the fix gets backported. This is designed to provide the "best of both worlds".
  - dv_dt 5y ago
    While this does cover quite a bit, I think there is a little more that the security team does in terms of coordination, encouraging or even making timely package updates. It’s understandable that some would fall on either side of being ok with that gap or not.
Delk 5y ago
I haven't been regularly using Debian in about 15 years now, so I don't know how things are nowadays. But back in the day when I was running Debian unstable on my desktop, temporary breakages in dependencies or in individual packages weren't that uncommon. I think sometimes some functionality was broken for a while when there was some kind of a transition going on. Those were entirely understandable given sid's nature, and it was much more reliable and functional than one would have expected from an "unstable" active development OS distro. It wasn't unstable in the sense of crashing or being generally buggy, and it was generally quite possible to use it as an everyday desktop. It did, at least back then, require more active administration and a corresponding mindset than a fire-and-forget stable release would, though. Sid might of course work as a basis for a distro for someone like Valve, but I think they'd need to do something similar to what Ubuntu does with freezes and weeding out issues before releases, or at the least have some kind of a delay before updates were pushed to non-testing devices if they based directly on the unstable release.

A lot of people have an irrational fear of Sid because it's called Unstable. And yet the use "rolling" distributions that often contains exactly the same software.

dv_dt 5y ago

I think many steer clear of sid because of the security policy: Please note that security updates for "unstable" distribution are not managed by the security team. Hence, "unstable" does not get security updates in a timely manner. [1] [1] https://www.debian.org/releases/sid/ https://www.debian.org/releases/sid/

goodpoint 5y ago
This phrasing is very misleading. Sid/Unstable and Testing track upstream releases. If an upstream developer releases a new version to fix a vulnerability, Sid gets the upstream fix just like other rolling distro. If a version in Testing has a vulnerability and Testing entered a pre-release freeze the fix gets backported. If a version in Stable has a vulnerability the fix gets backported. This is designed to provide the "best of both worlds".
- dv_dt 5y ago
  While this does cover quite a bit, I think there is a little more that the security team does in terms of coordination, encouraging or even making timely package updates. It’s understandable that some would fall on either side of being ok with that gap or not.

Delk 5y ago

I haven't been regularly using Debian in about 15 years now, so I don't know how things are nowadays. But back in the day when I was running Debian unstable on my desktop, temporary breakages in dependencies or in individual packages weren't that uncommon. I think sometimes some functionality was broken for a while when there was some kind of a transition going on. Those were entirely understandable given sid's nature, and it was much more reliable and functional than one would have expected from an "unstable" active development OS distro. It wasn't unstable in the sense of crashing or being generally buggy, and it was generally quite possible to use it as an everyday desktop. It did, at least back then, require more active administration and a corresponding mindset than a fire-and-forget stable release would, though. Sid might of course work as a basis for a distro for someone like Valve, but I think they'd need to do something similar to what Ubuntu does with freezes and weeding out issues before releases, or at the least have some kind of a delay before updates were pushed to non-testing devices if they based directly on the unstable release.