Historically, IIRC, just downloading an ISO was not easy to do. If it is now, that's a welcome change. But I still don't want to spend 4 hours downloading a bunch of software that's 3 years old...
How was it hard? You follow the links, visit the mirrors, and download it.
I believe that's wrong. In the Bad Old Days, Debian didn't provide ISO images. You had to download all the files from the repositories, download some scripts, and make them yourself. Perhaps a long-time debian user here can confirm that this is correct? I'm talking maybe 1999 or 2000, but my memory's really unclear on this.
This is true, then they had some weird "ISO maker" thing that you had to use rather then just downloading the entire disc set. Some places had them (linuxiso.org for one) but you couldn't get just raw ISO's from debian.org.
The few times that I've tried and used Debian I would just get the minimal install ISO and install the rest with dpkg or apt.
Essentially, there are three points here:
Stability: Both Woody/stable and Sarge/testing have stability at this point. Testing doesn't always have stability, I'll admit, but right now, Sarge does.
This point is useless, unless you're only going to administer your systems righ now. It doesn't work that way in real life. And how can you guarantee me that the next updates to sarge won't break it? Regardless of what you say about testing being stable, my experience prevents me from trusting it in production.
Exactly, that's why you have a separate testing and stable, because one is for TESTING, and the other is STABLE :) That's the whole point.
Cutting edge stuff: Woody is outdated and I've already accepted that. For servers, this generally isn't an issue,
It's only not an issue if you're willing to settle for sotware that
isn't as powerful as you could be using. And sometimes, even then, it
can be an issue. The bottom line is Debian's cycle is just too damn
slow to be useful in production. That doesn't make it bad, it just
makes other distros better choices IMO.
Bottom line is, if you want to use it in a production environment, you're going to want to use stable. If for anything else so the PHB won't bitch about using something labeled as "testing". He doesn't want to take that risk, and neither do I. We are even slowly moving to RHEL where I work now for the stability and support because we've had issues with our RH9 and Fedora boxes.
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