Neither Stable Nor Unstable: A Midrange Debian?

truefluke writes: "This was forwarded to me, from a friend who is a very loyal Debian supporter, with the cool news that Debian could become 'more up to date more often'. This news appeared here on the Debian news source. A good idea, and prob incentive for more folks to try out Debian without resorting to the old saw of 'too old / too slow.'" Debian developer Anthony Towns says in the list posting mentioned there that "[t]his is a (mostly finished) project that will allow us to test out distribution by making it "sludgey" rather than frozen[.]" Sounds like the same logic behind the Caldera "Technology Preview" and Red Hat's Rawhide -- give people more of what they want of The Bleeding Edge, without getting reckless with the official release.

Comments

Those Who Do Not Know FreeBSD are Doomed to Repeat

[Jayson]

-current
-release
-stable

hmmm..., when will the world learn?

Re:Sludgy..?

[kondrag]

How about "`slushy' rather than frozen".

Concern about taking testing away from Unstable?

[[Mobius]]

I noticed, when I read the thread originally, that there is some concern that this would take testers away from unstable. But I did not notice the counter-argument (which I happen to fall into). I'd love (really) to test more, except unstable is too unstable. Buggy I can handle, but not working isn't cool. I think this testing dist. would brin MORE testers in from stable.

Just my opinion, I've emailed my support and opinion, perhaps others should send their support for the idea to debian-devel.

I think this is an awesome idea, and I really hope it is formally implemented.
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One nice thing...

[DevTopics]

of open source is, that it is marked as "stable" when and only when it is really stable (and not when marketing has decided to ship the product), and yet you can still have your bleeding edge program when you like it. But dividing this into three different states is likely to confuse most people. It is better done if you obey the rule: "release often" (Eric Raymond). During testing phase you will find out which of these "unstable" releases are just "stable enough" to be used (that is, it is in the same state as most commercial software...). In Linux mailing lists, you'll see sometimes postings like "2.3.XX" is a stable version, use it if you really, really need feature YY". I think debian should use the same rulings. Just produce more developer releases, and if things turn out to be good enough, tell everyone about it (with a few warnings left). Its is better to be more specific: either, it is stable and tested and ready for the masses, or it ist bleeding edge where feature X works, feature Y is broken, and Z is useable if we have full moon. You just know what you're doing. And if you don't know, don't do it, even if it might work.