Debian isn’t 5 year releases… it’s more like 2, and that’s Stable. The whole point of stable is to be boring but reliable. Testing is more fun, and Unstable more fun still. Mixing in some Experimental for even closer to the edge. There is also Backports to bring a more stable base closer to the edge.
Having grown up on RISCOS with app folders and then gone to Windows, then wondered Linux land until finding Debian was my home, I worry about the movement back to basically app folders. I love the order of Debian. All those packages, with their dependencies, their build dependencies and source, all in database, I count with Wikipedia as achievements of man kind.
I meant the support timeline. Debian releases are supported for 5 years. You can basically skip an entire release and still be completely supported with security patches.
Perhaps you should consider the alternative, that it’s the lack of consistent dependencies across target distributions that’s the problem. Some of it is certainly fixable on the development side, but a lot of it is just the complexity of managing a software project that is expected to run in multiple very different environments.
I think the diversity is a strength. It means thing don’t fail the same way, try different new things, and tests things from more angles. Different distro are good. BSD is good for Linux.
Sounds like something not ready for production to me. If it is not maintainable without nailing down it’s dependencies, it’s got a problem. I much prefer the reproducable packages direction. Seams a way more maintainable and open, approach.
Debian isn’t 5 year releases… it’s more like 2, and that’s Stable. The whole point of stable is to be boring but reliable. Testing is more fun, and Unstable more fun still. Mixing in some Experimental for even closer to the edge. There is also Backports to bring a more stable base closer to the edge.
Having grown up on RISCOS with app folders and then gone to Windows, then wondered Linux land until finding Debian was my home, I worry about the movement back to basically app folders. I love the order of Debian. All those packages, with their dependencies, their build dependencies and source, all in database, I count with Wikipedia as achievements of man kind.
I meant the support timeline. Debian releases are supported for 5 years. You can basically skip an entire release and still be completely supported with security patches.
Just another way it is awesome.
Yes, it is awesome, I’m just saying that supporting that is a big ask for a software vendor, so containerizing dependencies is a viable workaround.
I’m always going to see it as second class and avoid that software when ever I can. I see it as symptom of either rotting software or poor developers.
Perhaps you should consider the alternative, that it’s the lack of consistent dependencies across target distributions that’s the problem. Some of it is certainly fixable on the development side, but a lot of it is just the complexity of managing a software project that is expected to run in multiple very different environments.
I think the diversity is a strength. It means thing don’t fail the same way, try different new things, and tests things from more angles. Different distro are good. BSD is good for Linux.
I agree, it just makes packaging that much more difficult, especially for fast moving packages. Hence containerization.
Sounds like something not ready for production to me. If it is not maintainable without nailing down it’s dependencies, it’s got a problem. I much prefer the reproducable packages direction. Seams a way more maintainable and open, approach.