[techtalk] *nix comparisons?

[Dan Nguyen]

On Mon, Jul 17, 2000 at 12:40:03AM -0700, curious wrote:
> which reminds me of my debian peeve :) the delay between Official releases
> is quite irks some (clearly nessary for debian to maintain it's
> distribution quality)... I've been trying to find a "debian subscription"
> so that I could have the latest debian-frozen on cd sent every so often so
> I don't have to wait forever to for a potato download when installing a
> new debian system.. (I run frozen and unstable on various systems with no
> issues other then an occasional apt complain {usualy from emacs})

Debian is much ahead of it's time.  An ideal Debian user, running any
Debian system would do updates to their system and regular intervals,
since there are security fixes to even slink.  But the long time
between releases is a problem for people not used to how Debian
works.  Although it's name is "unstable" it's actually quite stable.
Though you should be fore warend that things are going to break.  And
you will have to go through and fix problems when they occur.  Things
like the great Perl upgrade of a year ago.  Where hundred of packages
were broken.

Atleast Debian number their releases in a sane manner.  A minor Debian
version number 2.1 for Slink, and 2.2 for Potato often includes more
than just newer packages.  Things like debconf might get a whole
version number out of other distributions.  

 
-- 
     Dan Nguyen     |  It is with true love as it is with ghosts;
  nguyend7 at msu.edu  |  everyone talks of it, but few have seen it.
   dnn at debian.org   |                 -Maxime De La Rochefoucauld