Re: Debian - Release Cadence Options

On Sat, Oct 18, 2025 at 12:17:53AM +0200, Antoine Le Gonidec wrote:
> Le Fri, Oct 17, 2025 at 09:49:20AM -0700, Russ Allbery a écrit :
> > Greg McPherran <[email protected]> writes:
> > > I am considering using unstable, and would be happy to provide feedback
> > > on any findings. If someone could point me to the best contact for such
> > > feedback, so that I may be helpful, I would be grateful.
> > (…)
> > I would recommend testing over unstable unless you're very familiar with
> > Linux and comfortable with your ability to roll back to previous kernels,
> > downgrade and pin packages, and fix weird problems. Unstable doesn't break
> > that often, but it is prone to more low-level breakage than testing is.
> 
> And I would recommend unstable over testing, for security reasons, less
> risks of packages disappearing, and bugs actually being fixed in a
> timely manner.
> 
> In my 15 years of user support, a huge majority of reported problems
> were with testing. But the sample might be biased by testing being the
> one chosen by less experienced users, wrongly thinking it would be some
> kind of middle ground between stable and unstable.

In a way, it is: when packages land in testing they have passed through
a rough first test. So in a way, you get less surprises in testing.

In some other way... it's the other way around: packages "disappear" from
testing when some bigger issue is found, but they stay on stable. Plus,
since both don't have a security policy, security issues get (arguably)
fixed faster on testing.

If you (try to) install packages from a future suite (FrankenDebian),
then testing is more often the better bet. If you run a future suite
wholesale, the situation is not so clear. The difference to a rolling
release is that in the latter case, more effort is put to avoid
breakage.

Cheers
-- 
tomás

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