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Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 Released
emissary47 writes "The Debian Project is pleased to announce the release of Debian GNU/Linux version 3.0. Debian GNU/Linux is a free operating system, which now supports a total of eleven processor architectures, includes KDE and GNOME desktop environments, features cryptographic software, is compatible with the FHS v2.2 and supports software developed for the LSB. The Release Notes are available here."
In other news... Hell has frozen over, pigs are flying, and the Chicago Cubs have won the World Series.
I can't wait 'till Debian releases a stable version of Debian GNU/HURD ;)=
c0w goes moo.
Please stop trolling. Check out these links if your mom and dad haven't already pulled the plug:
0 02 /debian-devel-announce-200207/msg00011.html: //www.debian.org/News/2002/20020719e bian.org/releases/woody/releasenotes
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2
http
http://www.d
The whole point of Debian is that everything is done in the open. There's very little to be an "insider" on. Just subscribe to the mailing lists or read the archives and you'll be an insider.
Having said that, the future of Debian looks like a blue sky, with fluffy white clouds here and there. And a little flying saucer off in the distance.
noah
Debian appears to me to be very well thought out in comparison to other distributions. Everything seems to be done in a calm reasonable manner with the exception of my constant kick/banning from #debian on openprojects. Other distributions may throw in candy for the kiddies that is not ready but debian waits and in turn creates quality. Please discuss.. I cant wait for gnome2 to leave experimental and hit sid. Jonathan Taylor
Can't you kids do a proper slashdotting these days? It won't work unless we all pull together!
Carousel is a lie!
(because it's getting Slashdotted like mad)
The Debian Project is pleased to announce the release of Debian GNU/Linux version 3.0. Debian GNU/Linux is a free operating system, which now supports a total of eleven processor architectures, includes KDE and GNOME desktop environments, features cryptographic software, is compatible with the FHS v2.2 and supports software developed for the LSB.
With the addition of the IA-64 (ia64), HP PA-RISC (hppa), MIPS (mips, mipsel), and S/390 (s390) architectures, Debian GNU/Linux now supports a total of eleven architectures. It now runs on computers ranging from palmtops to supercomputers, and nearly everything in between, including the latest generation of 64 bit machines.
This is the first version of Debian to feature cryptographic software integrated into the main distribution. OpenSSH and GNU Privacy Guard are included in the default installation, and strong encryption is now present in web browsers and web servers, databases, and so forth. Further integration of cryptographic software is planned for future releases.
For the first time, Debian comes with the K Desktop Environment 2.2 (KDE). The GNOME desktop environment is upgraded to version 1.4, and X itself is upgraded to the much improved XFree86 4.1. With the addition of several full-featured free graphical web browsers in the form of Mozilla, Galeon, and Konqueror, Debian's desktop offerings have radically improved.
This version of Debian supports the 2.2 and 2.4 releases of the Linux kernel. Along with better support for a greater variety of new hardware (such as USB) and significant improvements in usability and stability, the 2.4 kernel provides support for the ext3 and reiserfs journaling filesystems.
Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 features a more streamlined and polished installation, which is translated into numerous languages. The task system has been revamped and made more flexible. The debconf tool makes configuration of the system easier and more user friendly. Debian GNU/Linux can be installed from CD, or from the network and a few floppies. It can be downloaded now, and will soon be available on CD-ROM from numerous vendors.
Upgrades to Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 from earlier releases are automatically handled by the apt package management tool. As always, Debian GNU/Linux systems can be upgraded painlessly, in place, without any forced downtime. For detailed instructions about installing and upgrading Debian GNU/Linux, please see the release notes.
This is the first release of Debian that is compatible with version 2.2 of the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS). Debian GNU/Linux now also supports software developed for the Linux Standard Base (LSB), though it is not yet LSB certified.
Current Debian users may be interested to know that this release of Debian supports build dependencies, to aid in building packages from source, and apt pinning, to ease partial upgrades to our testing or unstable branch. This release of Debian features aptitude as an alternative for the venerable dselect program, which will make it easier to select packages. About four thousand new software packages were added to the distribution in Debian GNU/Linux 3.0.
To make a pun demonstrates the highest understanding of a language
Add these to your sources.list and be thankful for all the good things Debian _has_ that other distributions _don't_. ;)
deb http://kde3.geniussystems.net/debian ./ ./
deb-src http://kde3.geniussystems.net/debian
niko
It installs the new kernel for you first. Then you choose to boot it at your leisure. No FORCED downtime.
I have been working with a variety of distributions out there and have come to the conclusion that, if you want it to work and work well, the Debian is probably the most trusted distribution out there. If you want bells and whistles, then you need to go someplace else.
On thing I have to mention here. If Debian merged with GenTOO, then there would be no stopping them! Optimal package compiles coupled with the best package management system AND the BEST PACKAGE MANAGERS out there. Now that would be cool!
I have to hand it to the Debian folks. They have an excellent policy that puts quality and reliability in front of everything else. I can trust this distribution to work on machines that I can't even access directly.
- Vorbis 1.0
- Perl 5.8.0
...and now Debian 3.0
REPENT, REPENT, THE END IS NIGH!News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
Debian 3.0 Woody comes with KDE 2 and XFree86 4.1 while 3 and 4.2 are out respectively. This is a bit sad, seeing that even CygWin and FreeBSD have more up-to-date versions in their releases.
Release processes do take time, and Debian woody's started long before KDE3 or XFree86 4.2 were released. It is not the policy of the Debian team to drop everything mid-release-prep and package the latest version of some package, regardless of how significant it may be. If that was the case, releases would take a great deal more time.
If you want to see the process go faster, feel free to step up and help out.
Since you're posting this sort of troll, you probably already know the truth of things, but in case you don't, I'll fill you in.
Debian GNU/Linux releases for 11 architectures, and aims to stable on all of them. Most distros concentrate on one or two (gentoo is no exception), and those one or two tend to be x86 and if you're lucky PPC. They also tend to cater to people that are in the latest-greatest-p6-123123MHz-gamer crowd.
It's important to realize that with Debian, users of non-standard architectures are not second class citizens like they are on other distros. If I install Debian Stable on a machine that Debian claims to support, I can be relatively sure that the system will run smoothly and without issue. This is much more than any other distro out there can say.
When you say that XF4.2 and KDE3 are stable, you mean they are stable on the intel architecture, something no one debates. But being stable on intel is useless to the Debian release crew if it doesn't compile on Alpha, SPARC, HPPA, and any of the other supported architectures.
Another thing that non-Debian users seem to have a very hard time with is the notion of Stable, Testing, and Unstable. When you use some other linux distro, a release is very important because the lack of a central repository and coordination of packages makes partial upgrades a royal pain in the butt. This is fondly called RPM hell. Actually, it has nothing to do with the RPM package format, which isn't really that much worse than the DEB format, but rather the way APT handles package dependencies and such.
A Debian user can keep his system up to date over a reasonable net connection, and I'd venture that most desktop debian users don't much care when something releases, because they don't track stable. Because stable needs to be stable on 11 architectures, it is nearly always behind -- but it's as stable as a rock. If you run x86 and want the lastest version of everything, stable is not for you. In that case, it doesn't matter when Debian releases.
If you're a newbie, track testing, because it's more stable than unstable but has a lot of pretty new packages. If you're adventurous and want the bleeding edge, track unstable. Despite its name, it's still more stable than say, Mandrake.
Hopefully, you're less ignorant now than you were before. If not, then you're beyond help.
The future of Debian looks like the past.
There will be, lo, much wailing and gnashing of teeth because Random Cool Package vX+1 isn't in the STABLE release. There will be much complaining by users (of which I am one!) when RCP vX+1 takes longer than 15 nanoseconds to hit the UNSTABLE release, regardless of how complicated it is to support on N (where N>=11) different architectures.
In about 3 months time, there will be much complaining about how long the freeze for "Sid" is taking, and how out of date "Woody" has become (completely ignoring the fact that most people using Debian on servers are probably more than happy to continue to use "Potato" or earlier, just so long as they can apt-get from security.debian.org).
In about 2.5 years, there will be another announcement on /. announcing Debian 4.0.
And all through this, real honest-to-goodness users will be able to keep right up to the bleeding edge of free software just by adding a single line to their sources.list, and won't notice a thing.
By someone who's apparently been running Debian 3.0 for some time now (a number of days, anyway) and didn't even notice. Thanks, apt-get dist-upgrade!
--
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
Cygwin is only for architectures that Windows supports, which also happens to be the most common, so of course it isnt a big deal to release early.
Just realize that Debian's XFree86 team does much more than package it and distribute. They are the ones porting it over, not RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE, Cygwin and FreeBSD.
Sorry if Debian doesn't fit your time frame, its not meant to fit anyones. It's meant to be done when its done, and thats the beauty in it. If you can't deal with that, either use unstable or use another distro.
P.S. - Unstable isn't as dangerous as people make it out to be. My unstable box has been running for over 250 days, and I update every day or two. If that is considered 'very risky' then what does that say about other distro's who claim to be stable? So don't say that we just use unstable as an excuse for slow package releases.
I am running KDE 3.0.2 and X4.2 and running Debian unstable, btw :)
Big thanks goes out to the Debian developer's, congratulations!!!!
-topside
What? You're surprised that Debian developers and users are geeks? What planet did you say you came from again? :)
In any case, note that the Debian developers finished in time to head off to the movies/restaurants/clubs (especially those of us on the left coast). It's the Debian users who are now faced with confronting their true geek natures.
finally my woody is stable!
~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
The release notes for x86 indicate that the thing
;)
ships with 2.2.20, with an optional 2.4.x for the bleeding-edgers, with (as explanation) a catty remark about the Debian developers not considering 2.4 a 'stable' branch.
Admittedly, I prefer Debian for the work that I do mainly because of the stability. But really -- 2.4 has been utterly reliable since ~2.4.14. Isn't this just a little paranoid? C'mon, folks, the thing is solid! I mean, the VM subsystem hasn't been completely re-written in *months*!
- undoware.ca
You'll have to take the system by surprise.
Do something unexpected and then switch kernel while the system is still confused.
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
There is no KDE3 in Unstable yet because everyone has been waiting patiently for Woody to be released. Just wait a little bit, and it will start to appear. Along with Gnome 2, I expect.
Can any of the Debian insiders comment on what the future of Debian looks like?
:)
:) What else would be in Debian's future? :)
Well, there are no real "Debian insiders". However, not everybody is an active member of Debian community, so I can explain a few things in that context.
First, before I go into what's being discussed with respect to Debian's very long release cycle, I'd just like to explain a few things.
Debian/stable releases are typically meant for server environments, and as a stable development platform. With that in mind, where tradeoffs are made, stability is favoured over the newest software available. "Stability" doesn't just mean apps that don't crash. It also means things that don't change out from underneath you.
System integrators, OEMs, businesses with a large base of deployed Debian machines, and developers of commercial, closed-source software all appreciate slow release cycles. A distribution which gets only critical updates over a few years is an easy distribution to target. Nothing will break for them, they can get to know the system extremely well.
For the server environment, well-proven applications will almost always be preffered. Where a newer package is required for some feature that they wish, options ARE available.
Debian is split into three trees. There's Debian/stable, Debian/testing, and Debian/unstable. Generally speaking, when a new package is uploaded to Debian, it first goes to "unstable" . After a suitable period of testing, and if there are no more bugs in the new package than the old package, it will be migrated to "testing". Actually, a lot more is considered, but those are probably the two most important aspects of the process.
So, first a package is uploaded to "unstable". If it's good, it's migrated to "testing". At an arbitrary point, when things seem pretty stable, "testing" will be frozen. Developers have ample warning of this; if a version of their package in "testing" is too old for their liking, they have the opportunity to update it before the freeze.
During the freeze, only important updates are made to packages. Security updates, updates which fix release-critical bugs, etc., etc.. When all the release-critical bugs have been fixed, the "testing" tree is made the "stable" tree, and we have a new Debian release. That's what we saw happen today
Once a Debian tree has been released, only important updates are made. If Debian/stable has OpenSSH version 3.4, and there's an important security fix made in 3.5, instead of 3.5 being uploaded, the fix will be made to 3.4, and a new update to that package uploaded.
This is all done in the interest of providing a robust, stable, easy-to-target distribution.
The "testing" and "unstable" trees will almost always have newer versions of packages than "stable". If a user using "stable" wishes a newer package, then they can either migrate to "testing" or "unstable", or simply install the newer package and its newer dependencies. Simple as pie.
So, really, a faster release process isn't strictly required. However, there are some very vocal parts of the Debian community which would appreciate a faster release cycle. I'm undecided on my own feelings, but there have been many, many, many suggestions.
Basically, they all revolve around freezing "testing" earlier than has been the norm. For more information, read the list archives at http://lists.debian.org/
For the rest of Debian's future? Package updates
Thanks
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
However, there can't have been much demand for it, because development ceased back in 2000.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
One can't experience the greatness of apt-get if they can't make it through the install
The first time I tried debian (I think this was Debian 1.3?), I got hopelessly confused by the installation and went back to redhat 4.2 and was much happier.
When 2.0 came out, I decided to give it another try, and struggled through the installation, and finally ended up with a nice system. But great as apt-get was, I felt it wasn't worth the pain.
Then I figured out the painless way to install debian: go through the installation and install the bare minimum that you absolutely need (this means no X!). Then once you've got that running, which is quick and easy, use apt for everything else you use. This has the side benefit that there's no wasted space on your drive.
Debian 3.0 Woody comes with KDE 2 and XFree86 4.1 while 3 and 4.2 are out respectively.
Big deal. Pretty soon, both the XFree86 and the KDE 3 situations will be rectified. So we've had to wait a bit longer. It's well worth it in my opinion since Debian makes installation and upgrade of all this software incredibly easy compared to ANY other operating system. If you want to go out and use something inferior, that's your own business. Eventually Debian gets current and once it leaps these major release hurdles, they stay current.
This is a bit sad, seeing that even CygWin and FreeBSD have more up-to-date versions in their releases. Just think of how much effort it took Cygwin to port the packages to Windows before packaging them, for example -- yet despite this their releases are far more timely.
The *BSD ports system is basically a nice way of organizing sources for programs. Very little effort is needed to add something to the system (this includes figuring out deps). So, it's not that big of a deal to see Debian lag behind BSD. Try again.
As for Cygwin, I'm trying to imagine how hard it is. Well, it just isn't. In the past few days, I've installed a lot of programs from source on Cygwin at work. None of them ever complained about not being in a real "unix" environment. Your statement clearly indicates that you've missed the whole point of Cygwin. Cygwin is designed such that it is not supposed to be hard to make packages of "unix" software for it. Duh.
The Debian packagers claim that there is a lot of intricacy involved in the packaging, and i'm sure there is, but I don't buy that people should have to use older software with known bugs, several months after the upstream authors have released their software.
Yes, it is infact intricate. Debian supports 11 platforms. Some are little endian, other big. Some are CISC, others MIPS. Some software (serpent cipher for example) only work on machines with certain endianness. As a result, this makes a dependency nightmare for the package maintainers. I'd like to see anyone else take on the job the Debian people have assumed and do 10% the quality of work.
As for using older software... well, fine, don't buy it then. It's well known in the IT world that you stick with the tried and true until the bleeding edge stops bleeding. A lot of shops know better than to jump right onto the latest version bandwagon because doing so destroys a potential resource of great value: watching other people fail in doing so. Knowing what your problems are when using software is better than using software and not knowing what problems you'll have. Again, duh.
Why bother.
Release of Debian 3.0 is great news.
But those of us who have been regularly checking their web site in anticipation will be surprised, because the number of release-critical bugs has increased lately, and stands at 186 as I type.
Check for yourself - up from a low point of under 100 a month ago.
Back to the release notes: we understand Debian likes to be eccentric, but isn't it silly to provide the release notes in Catalan? The total number of speakers of Catalan, worldwide, is far less than the number of native Chinese speakers in New York (or even in Queens). And less than the number of native German speakers in Paraguay. The release notes are not provided in either Chinese or German.
And as we all know (except for the magazines) the branches of debian are like this compared to other distros:
Now all that's left to say is, I wonder what they'll do when then run out of Toy Story characters to name the releases after? Or if they switch, what they'll switch to?
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Currently sarge == woody. Eventually newer packages will start to trickle down from sid to sarge, the same way the trickled down from sid to woody during the woody development. So yes, if you change to sarge you will be downgrading.
Most Debian users have been running almost exactly this for ages, as "woody" or "testing" --- It works rather nicely.
:-)
That's the point with Debian, you get to choose when to abandon rock solid reliability in favour of shiney new features, and most of the time it doesn't even degrade your reliability.
People seem to miss the point that Debian stable is meant to be STABLE. If you want to install a box in the middle of the desert, 100s of miles from anywhere, then you want it stable, and you don't give a damn about which version of KDE you use. If you want the latest KDE, just grab it out of unstable, or of off the KDE Debian package maintainer's bleeding edge archive --- It's your chouce. If it kills your machine, you get to press the reset button, but generally it won't, and if it does, it's what you decided you wanted, and you get the joy of filing a bug report, and helping to fix the problem.
Would I recomend a switch? Well, if you're happy with SuSE, and you don't care about Software Freedom, then SuSE is a fine distribution, unfortunately YaST is non-free software, so I'll never use it, and SuSE doesn't have apt-get, which makes any other feature they might have pale into insignificance in my opinion. Obviously, I am biased though
Debian: GNU/Linux done the Linux way
Er, correction to that.
I've just been informed that apt-get dist-upgrade is in fact not recomended, because if you don't know exactly what you're doing it has a tendency to remove half the packages on your system, and not bother upgrading. So you are left with a perfectly valid, but somewhat emaciated instalation at the end.
dselect on the other hand makes smarter decissions about things like "replaces" and "suggests" package interdependancies, and lets you resolve conflicts before going for the upgrade, so that is the recomended route, unles you happen to know better.
Of course, I didn't know that, because I know how to avoid getting bitten by apt-get, so don't tend to notice its teeth.
Sorry about the previous mis-information, please igore it (feel free to mod it into oblivion)
Debian: GNU/Linux done the Linux way
Gentoo enforces a knowledge of your system your building.
Sure a "desktop" may not have much performance increase since alot is already optimized, but imagine building and rolling your own Gentoo servers.
1. You know everything that is on them
2. You know how to build from scratch
3. *EVERYTHING* is optimized for your specific server, memory configuration and CPU's.
Heck, even in high end deskstop usage, the "ports" system Gentoo uses is superb.
Yeah, kde/x/gnome take a few hours, but come on, the beauty of linux is the ability to optimize the darn thing for your system.
My experience matches yours, mostly, but a couple of observations:
.deb system didn't seem to know about it (it's good enlightenment was basically a leaf program)... it's not the same.
One: "Inordinate amount of time" is too vague. An 'inordinate' amount of CPU time is more-or-less irrelevant to me. emerge is faster then trying to deal with a src deb.
Two: On that vein, downloading and compiling a source deb was non-trivial when I did it for enlightenment. Fiddly bits here, fiddly bits there, once installed the
I have a little underpowered laptop that I have had both Gentoo and Debian on. Great performance gains were obtained in both by compiling enlightenment with a lot of optimizations. The speed's about the same, but guess which was 'fire and forget' and which was 'fiddle with it for a couple of hours'?
I happily trade hours of my CPU time for minutes of my time. I can tell you which is more valuable to me in this era of desktop supercomputers.
Your points are valid, but for many of us, the priorities say Gentoo's a good deal overall. (I've started taking to selectively setting CFLAG and CXXFLAG settings on packages I think will benefit, without getting too anal about it. Non-optimized compiling is often 3-5x faster, even for just -march=i686 -O3 -pipe.) Perhaps not to you... but that's why we have dozens of major distros.
Hope this isn't modded as flamebait.
If I had modpoints, it probably would be.
Why? Because I feel confident that you know about stable/testing/woody, and therefore you probably know that getting Debian with the latest-and-greatest software is as easy as making a few modifications to the sources.list and running an apt-get dist-upgrade. You don't even really have to know what to put in your sources.list, there are hundreds of them floating around online. You can just pick and choose the parts you want.
Heaven forbid Debian's "default" release be meticulously stable. Shouldn't they include more cutting-edge software as opposed to the tried-and-true stuff? Wait, that doesn't make any sense. That's like arguing that distributions should ship with every desireable service enabled. Personally, I'm glad Debian doesn't ship with "iffy" software. If I want to take that risk, I'll spend two minutes adjusting my system to suit me.
-- "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage." -Naomi Littlebear
You hear me! Use the beta version of the PGI ISO, the graphical user-friendly autohardware detecting installer for Woody. Check out the website here, and the ISOs are at the first link (only 100MB download for the entire ISO).
Debian truely is the one true Linux distro. Its non-commercial, and developed by an open free internet community. Not only that, but Debian is superior to every other Linux distro. It is stable, easy to maintain, and it runs on any useful piece of computer hardware - no matter what platform that hardware is. Support Debian by simply spending the time to install and use it for your main Linux installation.
But the stable distribution attempts to eliminate even the 0.01% of cases you have allotted due to bugs in all packages across all platforms.
:) Debian has a slow release cycle. This is because they want to document and/or fix all bugs before they release things. This takes a long time. They have a slow release cycle.
:)
I once asked a question in #Debian.
I asked, "Why do bugs in packages which are obviously due to the program itself [menu options crashing the program, false advertising within the documentation, totally broken config parsing, etc], get reported to the Debian package maintainers? Don't package maintainers just package stuff up and put it in the tree?"
The response was, "A bug in a Debian package is a bug in the distribution."
Debian stable attempts to have _all_ bugs ironed out or documented. I'm serious. This is different than RedHat [latest version] which contains an attempt to iron out a lot of bugs, but is spurred mostly by neat developments in the software they distribute. It's not good or bad either way, just different.
You've heard it a million times, but maybe it will register one day.
Debian unstable plus "unofficial" sources is newer than RedHat [latest version]. apt-get resolves a FUCKING SHITLOAD of dependency problems that develop using rpm.
It's simple, really. It's nice. It makes you happy. People like Debian because it makes them feel good to just type in "apt-get install ", twiddle their thumbs for the download period, and then use it. And it almost always just works. The times that it doesn't work, it usually means that there is no such package or you spelled it wrong, and more often than not you got the name wrong.
When this is the worst thing your distribution does, you're doing well.
As my father lik@(munch munch)...
so, you want to recompile package foo, well first you need some source
../foo-1.2.3*deb
apt-get source foo
or maybe some newer source
apt-get source foo/unstable
or maybe you need the source that became available 5 minutes ago, in which case you do one of the above, drop the new tarball in the current directory, go into the old Debian source directory, and run uupdate and maybe fix some patching problems in the new directory that got created for you.
Next, you need to build this stuff, so let's get in the source directory:
cd foo-1.2.3
oh, but we might need some other development libraries to build this, so lets grab what we need
apt-get build-dep foo
that's better, now we can tweak some source or options maybe, and make ourselves a package
debuild
right, so now we have a new package, so we install it
sudo dpkg -i
and it gets installed (or maybe it has some dependencies, if you got this far, you can work it out yourself) just like it was an official Debian package, which means you get to remove it cleanly, etc. if the need arrises.
Who ever said source was difficult to play with in Debian? Debian is by developers, for developers -- we like source. That's why we're into Free Software.
Debian: GNU/Linux done the Linux way
Why does Debian always come with such old stuff? Fine, maybe KDE 2.2 is more stable than 3 but still...
Well, we test it until we're happy with it. This takes time. Time during which newer packages get released. Packages that generally get uploaded to Debian unstable (or in the case of KDE3, Debian experimental), then people like yourself that want to run that package have to go through the "trauma" of editing one line in one file (or using a cute point and shoot front end), and then they can pick and mix what software they want. Is that really so difficult to understand?
Other people may release things because their marketing department tells them to. Debian has the luxury of not having a marketing department, so we don't need to do that. That's why we use the word stable, to mean stable.
OK, it takes longer than it might if we were all being paid to do this, but who cares. It's so easy to select the versions of software you want, and select the level of instability you can live with, that there is no issue to be resolved here.
For example, you might want to run a known good version of postgreSQL on you machine to look after you accounts database (don't want to loose that) but be willing to run a cute KDE3 based database access tool to view that data, on the assumption that if it crashes, it probably won't have chance to ask postgreSQL to do anything too bad --- your choice, go right ahead. apt-get will even keep track of that, adn continue to upgrade postgeSQL from the stable branch, and kdata (or whatever) from unstable, or even http://freds.kde.emporium.com/debian/ say.
In summary, give Debian a try if you fancy it, but please stop coming up with spurious excuses not to, if you don't.
Debian: GNU/Linux done the Linux way
"For example, you might want to run a known good version of postgreSQL on you machine to look after you accounts database (don't want to loose that) but be willing to run a cute KDE3 based database access tool to view that data, on the assumption that if it crashes, it probably won't have chance to ask postgreSQL to do anything too bad --- your choice, go right ahead. apt-get will even keep track of that, adn continue to upgrade postgeSQL from the stable branch, and kdata (or whatever) from unstable, or even http://freds.kde.emporium.com/debian/ say."
Ah, that I didn't know. I thought Debain was more static than that. Now I might have a reason to install it on a rainy day. Thanks =)