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No, that's exactly the thing to complain about. That whole model dates to before automated testing was even really a thing, and no one knew how to do QA; your

No, that's exactly the thing to complain about. That whole model dates to before automated testing was even really a thing, and no one knew how to do QA; your QA was all the people willing to run your code and report bugs, and that took time. Not to mention, you think the C of today is bad? Have you looked at old C? And the disadvantage is that backporting is manual, resource intensive, and prone to error - and the projects that are the most heavily invested in that model are also the projects that are investing the least in writing tests and automated test infrastructure - because engineering time is a finite resource. On top of that, the backport model heavily discourages the kinds of refactorings and architectural cleanups that would address bugs systemically and encourage a whack-a-mole approach - because in the backport model, people want fixes they can backport. And then things just get worse and worse. We'd all be a lot better off if certain projects took some of the enthusiasm with which they throw outrageous engineering time at backports, and spent at least some of that on automated testing and converting to Rust.

jeroenhd 5mo ago
If you want that, you don't want Debian. Other people do. Some people will even run Debian on the desktop. I would never, but some people get real upset when anything changes. Debian does regularly bring newer versions of software: they release about every two years. If you want the latest and greatest Debian experience, upgrade Debian on week one. From your description, you seem to want Arch but made by Debian?
- koverstreet 5mo ago
  Well, my workstation runs Debian sid, and all the newer stuff runs NixOS... But that does nothing for people who write and support code Debian wants to ship - packaging code badly can create a real mess for upstream.
- jampekka 5mo ago
  > From your description, you seem to want Arch but made by Debian? Isn't that essentially Debian unstable (with potentially experimental enabled)? I've been running Debian unstable on my desktops for something like 20 years.
- kiney 5mo ago
  I run Debian on desktop and laptops. Because I want stable versions with only security backports
- PunchyHamster 5mo ago
  Debian Testing works just fine on desktop and it is up to date enough to not really be an issue. And despise the name is probably more stable than vast majority of rolling release distros
zrm 5mo ago
> That whole model dates to before automated testing was even really a thing, and no one knew how to do QA; your QA was all the people willing to run your code and report bugs, and that took time. That's not what it's about. What it's about is, newer versions change things. A newer version of OpenSSH disables GSSAPI by default when an older version had it enabled. You don't want that as an automatic update because it will break in production for anyone who is actually using it. So instead the change goes into the testing release and the user discovers that in their test environment before rolling out the new release into production. > On top of that, the backport model heavily discourages the kinds of refactorings and architectural cleanups that would address bugs systemically and encourage a whack-a-mole approach - because in the backport model, people want fixes they can backport. They're not alternatives to each other. The stable release gets the backported patch, the next release gets the refactor. But that's also why you want the stable release. The refactor is a larger change, so if it breaks something you want to find it in test rather than production.
- koverstreet 5mo ago
  You're going to have to update production at some point, and delaying it to once every 2 years is just deferred maintenance. And you know what they say about that... So when you do update and get that GSSAPI change, it comes with two years worth of other updates - and tracking that down mixed in with everything else is going to be all kinds of fun. And if you're two years out of the loop and it turns out upstream broke something fundamental, and you're just now finding out about it while they've moved on and maybe continued with a redesign, that's also going to be a fun conversation. So if the backport model is expensive and error prone, and it exists to support something that maybe wasn't such a good idea in the first place... well, you may want something, but that doesn't make it smart.
  - dagenix 5mo ago
    If you don't like the debian model, didn't use debian. There are people that like the debian model, it seems like you aren't one of them, though. That doesn't make them wrong.
  - 5mo ago
bluGill 5mo ago
You have far too much faith in automated testing. Don't get me wrong, I use and encourage extensive automated testing. However only extensive manual testing by people looking for things that are "weird" can really find all bugs. (though it remains to be seen what AI can do - I'm not holding my breath)
- koverstreet 5mo ago
  100% - but that's where writing regression tests when people find things really helps with the stress levels of future-you :)
rlpb 5mo ago
Refactoring and rewrites prove time and time again that they also introduce new bugs and changes in behaviour that users of stable releases do not want. For what you want, there are other distributions for that. Debian also has stable-backports that does what you want. No need to rage on distributions that also provide exactly what their users want.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
e12e 5mo ago
How do you do QA without locking a set of features?
PunchyHamster 5mo ago
> That whole model dates to before automated testing was even really a thing, and no one knew how to do QA; your QA was all the people willing to run your code and report bugs, and that took time. Not to mention, you think the C of today is bad? Have you looked at old C The automatically tested Debian release is called Debian Testing. And it is stable enough. Debian Stable is basically "we target particular release with our dependencies instead of requiring customer to update entire system together with our software". That model works just fine as long as you don't go too far back. > On top of that, the backport model heavily discourages the kinds of refactorings and architectural cleanups that would address bugs systemically and encourage a whack-a-mole approach - because in the backport model, people want fixes they can backport. And then things just get worse and worse. Narrator: It turned out things were not getting worse, they were just fine. > We'd all be a lot better off if certain projects took some of the enthusiasm with which they throw outrageous engineering time at backports, and spent at least some of that on automated testing and converting to Rust. That project is RedHat, not Debian, they backport entire features back to old versions (together with bugs!)

jeroenhd 5mo ago

If you want that, you don't want Debian. Other people do. Some people will even run Debian on the desktop. I would never, but some people get real upset when anything changes. Debian does regularly bring newer versions of software: they release about every two years. If you want the latest and greatest Debian experience, upgrade Debian on week one. From your description, you seem to want Arch but made by Debian?

koverstreet 5mo ago
Well, my workstation runs Debian sid, and all the newer stuff runs NixOS... But that does nothing for people who write and support code Debian wants to ship - packaging code badly can create a real mess for upstream.
jampekka 5mo ago
> From your description, you seem to want Arch but made by Debian? Isn't that essentially Debian unstable (with potentially experimental enabled)? I've been running Debian unstable on my desktops for something like 20 years.
kiney 5mo ago
I run Debian on desktop and laptops. Because I want stable versions with only security backports
PunchyHamster 5mo ago
Debian Testing works just fine on desktop and it is up to date enough to not really be an issue. And despise the name is probably more stable than vast majority of rolling release distros

zrm 5mo ago

> That whole model dates to before automated testing was even really a thing, and no one knew how to do QA; your QA was all the people willing to run your code and report bugs, and that took time. That's not what it's about. What it's about is, newer versions change things. A newer version of OpenSSH disables GSSAPI by default when an older version had it enabled. You don't want that as an automatic update because it will break in production for anyone who is actually using it. So instead the change goes into the testing release and the user discovers that in their test environment before rolling out the new release into production. > On top of that, the backport model heavily discourages the kinds of refactorings and architectural cleanups that would address bugs systemically and encourage a whack-a-mole approach - because in the backport model, people want fixes they can backport. They're not alternatives to each other. The stable release gets the backported patch, the next release gets the refactor. But that's also why you want the stable release. The refactor is a larger change, so if it breaks something you want to find it in test rather than production.

koverstreet 5mo ago
You're going to have to update production at some point, and delaying it to once every 2 years is just deferred maintenance. And you know what they say about that... So when you do update and get that GSSAPI change, it comes with two years worth of other updates - and tracking that down mixed in with everything else is going to be all kinds of fun. And if you're two years out of the loop and it turns out upstream broke something fundamental, and you're just now finding out about it while they've moved on and maybe continued with a redesign, that's also going to be a fun conversation. So if the backport model is expensive and error prone, and it exists to support something that maybe wasn't such a good idea in the first place... well, you may want something, but that doesn't make it smart.
- dagenix 5mo ago
  If you don't like the debian model, didn't use debian. There are people that like the debian model, it seems like you aren't one of them, though. That doesn't make them wrong.
- 5mo ago

bluGill 5mo ago

You have far too much faith in automated testing. Don't get me wrong, I use and encourage extensive automated testing. However only extensive manual testing by people looking for things that are "weird" can really find all bugs. (though it remains to be seen what AI can do - I'm not holding my breath)

koverstreet 5mo ago
100% - but that's where writing regression tests when people find things really helps with the stress levels of future-you :)

rlpb 5mo ago

Refactoring and rewrites prove time and time again that they also introduce new bugs and changes in behaviour that users of stable releases do not want. For what you want, there are other distributions for that. Debian also has stable-backports that does what you want. No need to rage on distributions that also provide exactly what their users want.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

e12e 5mo ago

How do you do QA without locking a set of features?

PunchyHamster 5mo ago

> That whole model dates to before automated testing was even really a thing, and no one knew how to do QA; your QA was all the people willing to run your code and report bugs, and that took time. Not to mention, you think the C of today is bad? Have you looked at old C The automatically tested Debian release is called Debian Testing. And it is stable enough. Debian Stable is basically "we target particular release with our dependencies instead of requiring customer to update entire system together with our software". That model works just fine as long as you don't go too far back. > On top of that, the backport model heavily discourages the kinds of refactorings and architectural cleanups that would address bugs systemically and encourage a whack-a-mole approach - because in the backport model, people want fixes they can backport. And then things just get worse and worse. Narrator: It turned out things were not getting worse, they were just fine. > We'd all be a lot better off if certain projects took some of the enthusiasm with which they throw outrageous engineering time at backports, and spent at least some of that on automated testing and converting to Rust. That project is RedHat, not Debian, they backport entire features back to old versions (together with bugs!)