Hi, I am enjoying Debian's testing branch as a reasonably stable and up-to-date 'rolling' release, and I have to say it satisfies all my desires, almost. The one thing that bothers me is that every two years, the unstable/testing branches are frozen to certain extent because of the stable releases. This means the testing branch can be quite lagged behind upstream releases. One example is gcc, with gcc-11 released almost 6 months ago, and it is still not default in debian testing - I know it is being worked on right now and probably only a couple days away, but still...
So the question is, why not cut a release branch every two years, and at the same time keep the unstable/testing alive? Is it because debian developers think it's too much work to reconcile the differences later, so they prefer freezing? Some ppl recommend arch for this reason, but I am already familiar with apt's way of things, and would hold off switching before I have a better understanding of the bigger picture. I am certainly not qualified to make recommendations here, just wondering what is the reason behind it and if there is some proposal to make testing a better/closer 'rolling' release that ppl like me can enjoy better:) cheers, P
