On Saturday 16 Feb 2008, hantslug@??? wrote:
> I know that some of you are using Debian Lenny.
Sarge, then Etch now Lenny all as testing. Not for my family or my home
server, just my own desktop system.
> How near stable is it?
If all goes well, Lenny will go into freeze late this spring/early summer, and
reach stable status in autumn. Many things are as they will be in
Lenny-stable, other things are still is transit.
Other than the Woody/Sarge transition Debian isn't as bad as people say, Etch
came out nearly to schedule and Lenny seems to be running to schedule. That's
not to say that Lenny will arrive on time, only when it's ready!
> Is it in essence desk-top ready or is it still a case of living
> dangerously?
It's perfectly usable, but like SID things do break now and then, and the
testing installer sometimes doesn't work. I'd say other than X.org stuff most
applications gradually improve slowly over time until we hit the freeze when
things really stabilise. X.org can break horribly when major changes happen,
but that's usually not all that often.
The one thing to be most aware of is that testing doesn't get security fixes
like SID or stable. If something is broken, then a patch is created for
stable asap, at the same time SID gets a patch but testing only gets code
after it's been in SID a few days/week - even security fixes. I gather there
are plans to change this, and once testing enters freeze, it starts to get
treated more like stable so it gets security fixes asap.
--
Adam Trickett
Overton, HANTS, UK
Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for
the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all.
-- John Maynard Keynes
