RE: [PLUG] Debian Question

[Bill Jonas <bj@netaxs.com>]

On Sat, 3 Jun 2000, Jack Wilkinson wrote:

>potato is 2.2.x based... Debian has a long period of time between releases,
>so when the new one is even in the later stages of being unstable, the old
>one is far out of date.  You can download potato now using apt if you want.

I just wanted to add that Debian's 'unstable' distribution isn't really
so.  What that term means in the context of the Debian project is that
they haven't put it through their QA wringer yet, and stuff may break
temporarily (ie, if you run an 'apt-get update;apt-get dist upgrade'
daily from cron, for example).

As you probably know, right now it stands as follows:
stable is the same as slink (official Debian release 2.1)
frozen is the same as potato (will probably be 2.2)
unstable is the same as woody (who knows what this will be by the time
it comes out)

At this particular point in time, I'd recommend against actually going
with unstable.  The majority of the attention right now is being focused
on moving frozen to stable.  Alternatively, if you don't feel
comfortable going with frozen is to upgrade only certain pieces of slink
(ie, the kernel, gcc/egcs, etc).  Another alternative is to go with a
distribution of Debian that one of the project guys put together a while
ago known as 'Slink-and-a-Half', which has a 2.2 kernel and other
updates from the last stable release.  (I know there's a page somewhere,
but I can't recall where.  Anybody?)

This, of course, is the downside of focusing mainly on stability (as
opposed to currentness, like commercial distributions); things tend to
get somewhat outdated while making the next release stable.

Bill
-- 
>Ever heard of .cshrc?             | "Linux means never having to delete
That's a city in Bosnia. Right?    |  your love mail." -- Don Marti
(Discussion in comp.os.linux.misc  |  http://www.netaxs.com/~bj/
on the intuitiveness of commands.) |  http://www.harrybrowne.org/


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