Graham Wilson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > Regardless. Having people install fresh machines with things like > > Postgres 7.2 is just embarrassing. > > I am not embarrassed.
Well perhaps you should be. Whenever they ask for support those users will be told the version their running is hopelessly out of date and all the trouble their having is because of their choice of version. (Actually the postgres list does an admirable job of attempting to provide support for 7.2 and even 7.1 but inevitably the answer turns out to be "that problem was fixed in 7.3. Or now, 7.4.) Those users will also be struggling with major production issues like being unable to run 24x7 because of required periodic maintenance (vacuum and reindex) that require downtime. Basically, given that 7.3 has been out for an entire release cycle (7.4 will be released within days), giving 7.2 to new users is simply ridiculous. The same holds for having new users install 2.2 kernels or XFree86 4.1. I mean, sure there are cases when these things are passable or even useful, but by default telling a new user that these awful buggy releases are what he or she should be installing on a fresh install is just, well, as I said, embarrassing. Personally I'm of the opinion that stable is useless. It certainly has no use for me. Perhaps if I ran a production server on debian I might think otherwise but I rather doubt it. When I had production servers they all ran 2.4 and needed the latest stable releases of anything important like database, mail, web server services. If I ran production servers on debian today I would probably pick an arbitrary date off snapshot.debian.org and declare that my "stable". If I had security problems I would pick a date recent enough to have the security fixes, test it, and declare it "stable". It wouldn't be guaranteed to be bug-free, but then nothing is. Stable has tons of minor bugs that no upstream maintainer would listen to because they were fixed aeons ago anyways, or more likely are no longer relevant in current sources. -- greg