(Please don't CC me on list mail.) On 16-May-07, 01:58 (CDT), "Mgr. Peter Tuharsky" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Steve Greenland wrote / nap?sal(a): > > As I illustreted, "rock solid" is not automatically guaranteed by > oldness of software or by length of pre-release testing.
And as others have pointed out, the purpose of stable is to minimize disruptions. For many users, living with known bugs with known workarounds is a *lot* better than identifying new bugs. > We could start with programs that don't other programs depend on much. > For example, what is the purpose of using 2 years old Firefox, > Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org and other such stand-alone programs? They > could be flawlessly upgraded during stable release life cycle. Sigh. No, they can't. For one thing, it's not just Iceweasel, it's all the plugins and extensions that might be in use, *and* any external software or libraries that those extensions use. Not to mention all the other software that uses iceweasel libraries. Additionally, any internal webapps have to be validated against the new iceweasel. Internal macros need to be validated against the new OO.org. It's a lot of work. Quite a bit of it cannot be done by Debian, because it's site specific. I had a client for which getting a simple patch (1 or 2 lines of code) installed on their production server took literally > month, because of their testing requirements and minimal scheduled downtimes. Getting a completely new version installed took much longer. Now, that may be of little relevance to the home user. But I know some such users who also *don't* like upgrades, because they're happy with what they have and don't need to change. For example, my father-in-law just this year went from Mac OS9 to OSX, mostly because his hardware was dying. So he hadn't upgraded in >6 *years*, and didn't feel he was missing anything. There's quite a few of those people out there. Steve -- Steve Greenland The irony is that Bill Gates claims to be making a stable operating system and Linus Torvalds claims to be trying to take over the world. -- seen on the net -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]