Rick Moen wrote:
>Quoting Niall Walsh (linux at esatclear.ie):
>>>If you want to recommend people run testing all the time, fine, I
>>> don't!
>>I certainly do (with access to unstable packages, and "pinning" set to
>favour testing) for desktop boxen. Again, skim-reading DSAs (and acting
>on them) isn't a hardship. It's normal to expect to read (and heed)
>security advisories, if you run Linux.
>>Perhaps it is but should it be? I regard debian security
infrastructure as one of it's key advantages.
>>I think most people like being pampered.
>>>>>It's nice. It's _also_ the rare exception. People who say [paraphrasing]
>"It's dangerous to run testing because you don't auto-receive security
>updates" are suffering a serious failure of perspective
>>If that's how I came across then I take it back. I'm saying you have
to be more conscious of security updates if you don't run stable and it
is slightly more work for testing then unstable. Both testing and
unstable are easy to keep up to date though.
>>A: Use testing, lose security updates when sarge is released
>>>>> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>One last time: I've had security updates on the testing branch for
>years. It's just not as completely automated as on the stable branch,
>but still better than most Linux distributions in that regard.
>>By debian standards you lose them (you get to update your packages not
security updates), by any other distributions standards you are probably
still far far ahead of the game! You have not had security updates for
testing (well you have for a few months around release times), you've
just had security notices and the option to upgrade the effected
packages (and their dependencies) to unstable. As I say, it's still
fine, just not as peachy as debian can be (which is how people should
experience it first and it's up to them to decide if the extra admin is
worth it for newer versions of software).
I've happily run testing (testing+sid) on desktops, that doesn't mean
I'd recommend it in general to others!
Niall Walsh
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