Re: Slightly OT: Debian Community Poll

[Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org>]

Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
>> The reason for the longer life cycle of Debian is to match the
>> expectations of conservative server administrators. They buy a new
>> server and install Debian N on it and do not want any changes in the
>> software except, reluctantly, for security bugs. 3 or 4 years later
>> they buy a new server, install Debian N+1 on it, migrate their data
>> and scrap the old server.
>
> That answers my question! Outdated packages is Debian policy.

Not policy; just a consequence. Also, that depends on the definition
of "outdated".  To a conservative server administrator, a 3-year-old
package can be perfectly up-to-date if it serves its purpose and has
no security bug; this is their choice, not yours. Please do not impose
your definition of "outdated" on everyone else and do not disparage
the hard work that Debian Developers put in quality control. You, an
Ada software engineer, should know better than "the latest is always
the greatest".

You deleted the other half of what I said, so I'll paste it here for
reference:

>> Since you are neither an academic nor a conservative server
>> administrator, as an individual user administering only your own
>> machine, you have no reason to lock yourself into a release cycle at
>> all; you can upgrade as seldom or as often as you want to. As a
>> developer of a future Debian package, you however must build on
>> unstable; hence my suggestion to use whatever you want as a user and
>> an unstable chroot for your Debian packaging.

This second half was for you, Dmitry, and I am a bit sad that you
chose to ignore it. Please re-read it aloud, slowly.

--
Ludovic Brenta.