[Techtalk] Debian versus GenToo

[Terri Oda]

On Sep 20, 2004, at 11:44 PM, Beth Skwarecki wrote:
> Testing is a sort of special beast. It doesn't have the newest stuff, 
> it
> isn't the stablest, and in fact it's more of a security risk than the
> others. I only recommend it to people who (a) are behind a good 
> firewall,
> and (b) want to be able to use the testing installer but don't feel 
> ready
> for unstable.

Well, testing, in my experience, is 99% or more stable, but allows you 
to use stuff that's beyond stable.  When I started using debian stable 
was *ancient*, testing was the only reasonable option for the machine I 
did most of my development on, since I needed quite a bit of newer 
stuff (development tools, drivers, etc.), but it needed to not break on 
upgrade 'cause I didn't have time to deal with it, and I only really 
had the one machine that was under my control, so it would have blocked 
me from working to have it down.  Nowadays, stable might be more 
reasonable (as long as you upgrade a few things), as it's not quite so 
far behind the curve.

Truth be told, though, I haven't tried unstable -- how unstable is it 
really?

  Terri