David Z Maze wrote:
> Philip Ross writes:
> > I am looking to migrate a few Red Hat boxes to Debian in the next
> > month or two and am currently wondering whether to install woody or
> > sarge.

You did not say but are those servers or desktops?

Desktop users tend to be brutal.  They want the latest bright object
to swing by their field of view.  They think a week is a long time to
wait for something.  They complain forever about something if it is
broken.  If you only have two desktop users then you will be able to
convince them that stable is a good thing.  I would have my mom run
stable.  But if you have a hundred (or several hundred) users then you
won't be able to politic that successfully.  Many of them are also
very sharp hackers too.  They will want the latest xine or something.
I routinely have users that spin their desktop to unstable, and then
complain that something is broken there!  I just expect that.  And
laugh at them.  Bwahawha...  :-)  Who are your users?

Servers on the other hand are different.  Debian stable is a perfect
fit for them.  Stable has everything they need.  Rock solid.  Security
updates.  It is a beautiful thing.  (Yes, I admit that I took my
servers to LaMont's latest bind9 and postfix backports.  But I know
those services very well personally too.)

Servers to me mean DNS, NTP, NIS/YP, SMTP, etc.  But servers might
mean defect trackers, gforge/sourceforge style web environments, other
things.  Stable is not up to handling gforge at the moment.  Just an
example that one person's idea of server is different from another
person's idea.  What is yours?

> If you're new to Debian, I'd strongly suggest starting with the stable
> distribution (so, in this case, woody); if you decide it's too stale
> for you, you can augment it with backports or decide to upgrade to
> testing or unstable later.  If you decide that testing is too broken
> for you right now, it's very hard to go back to stable.

And let me agree with everything David said.  This is exactly my
strategy for the machines I support.

Bob

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