Trackin' stable vs. releases

[Alan DuBoff]

There was an interesting topic that Rick brought up at Cafe Borrones last 
night, that being what do releases really matter if you're trackin' stable?

This is certainly an interesting topic, and I'm sure that many people do 
track stable, to eventually get the new release when it comes out, but I find 
myself at some point in the cycle, moving to unstable for various reasons to 
do with the newer software that I prefer to be using is on unstable.

In theory, the only thing that really changes are the actual install CDs when 
a new release comes out and one could always do a dist-upgrade and take their 
entire system to a different release other than the media used for install. 
In theory, because some of us have found that it doesn't work so cleanly all 
of the time, often giving an abrupt error during the actual upgrade.

As I have pointed out, for me there is usually software that drives my 
decision to move to unstable, and in the case of woody, I'll stick on stable 
for quite a while after woody is released. However, it was software like 
XFree86 4.x, Mozilla, and even <gasp> Emacs 21.1 that make being on unstable 
satisfying for me at some point in the cycle.

I thought this might make a better topic rather than having a wee-wee contest 
over invariant sections in licensing...or at least compliment it...

-- 

Alan DuBoff
Software Orchestration, Inc.
GPG: 1024D/B7A9EBEE 5E00 57CD 5336 5E0B 288B 4126 0D49 0D99 B7A9 EBEE