On 16/05/15 08:18 PM, Liam O'Toole wrote:
On 2015-05-16, Anil Duggirala wrote:
Im a newbie and would like to know why libraries in Jessie are some much
more up to date than in wheezy ? If the libraries have been tested and
are stable then why arent they available in the wheezy repositories. I
had a terrible time, trying to get a newer version of glibc to play some
games in wheezy, and the version in jessie is much more up to date,
thanks for the info,
The vey meaning of "stable" in a Debian context is that software
versions don't (usually) change over the course of a release. Therefore
it's no surprise that libraries in jessie (released last month) are more
up-to-date than those in wheezy (released in 2013).
Just to put that in context. I had a server which originally ran Squeeze
without problems. I upgraded to Wheezy some time later, again without
problems. Somewhere over the course of Wheezy updates however, something
broke.
The motherboard had USB3 ports and AMD graphics (although it was
headless - just in case I needed to hook a monitor up) and the IOMMU
started acting up (Strangely I have a workstation running Jessie with a
similar problem). Even though the updates were mainly security fixes, I
lost the ability to remotely (re)start the machine. My ssh connection
couldn't establish because the IOMMU code for this particular board was
broken. I had to be on site with monitor and keyboard to boot to repair
mode then manually start the services I needed.
Last week I found myself having to upgrade to Jessie to fix the issue.
Although Jessie code is what is currently causing the problem with my
workstation, it fixed the problem on the server.
Stories like this abound, which is why people are leery about upgrading
critical systems. Stable means that only serious bug fixes and security
updates are issued, not feature enhancements. Limiting the numbers of
updates means that larger installations get to test them before running
them live, while smaller setups like small or home offices can usually
feel safe performing updates.
Normally I wouldn't upgrade a server until the .1 release of the new
Debian stable. In this case, I had a problem so I took a chance that
upgrading on the .0 release would fix more than it broke. Thanks to the
quality of the Debian development process, the upgrade went smoothly and
the system is running properly again.
If you want to keep up with the latest libraries, etc., run
Debian/Testing permanently. This is fairly stable but you will encounter
problems from time to time, as you will with any "rolling release" distro.
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