D. R. Evans wrote: > > If the user really wants /usr/bin/python the user should install > > python-is-python2 or python-is-python3. And these two packages conflict > > with each other. > > Once upon a time, not really that long ago, Debian seemed to make very > sensible decisions to keep everything stable and working across upgrades. In > the past few years, however, I find myself shaking my head and wondering > "what were they thinking?"
95% of the time, making the best available choices in a world where nobody else cares. 4% of the time, shrugging and saying "everybody else is doing it". 1% of the time, inexplicable. I think that these ratios are better than other distributions, which is why I keep using and recommending Debian. > It's not that some of the things they've done are > necessarily *wrong* per se, but they have certainly been a lot more > experimental than one wants in an environment that one expects to keep > working properly across upgrades; it seems that somehow the importance of > keeping the users' systems functioning as one hopes they will is now a much > lower priority than it used to be. You can't have a bug-free system, you can't have a stable system, and you can't have an up-to-date system. You can lean closer to any two of those by getting further from the third. In general, each Debian stable=>stable upgrade has been less disruptive than the previous one. A distro can go to a rolling release, but that means that either something is broken all the time or there is only one canonical way to do things: a notional Debian "Luxo" rolling release that tried to produce a stabilized stream from testing would require twice as many Debian Developers, or an 85% cut in the number of packages, or perhaps both. -dsr-