Re: Debian - Release Cadence Options

On Fri, Oct 17, 2025 at 10:40:53AM -0400, Greg McPherran wrote:
>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. (Introduce myself: I'm particularly focused on Rust now, but I have a background in kernels and C/C++/C# [30 yrs exp.]. I also have BSEE + post-grad MS courses).

If you can fix a broken linux, then using unstable would also be "giving 
back" to the project. We desperately need experienced user using our 
unreleased development version and report bugs with high quality so we 
can fix them before the release.

I have been using unstable on my personal workstations for decades with 
good experiences. Have a rescue system like grml available, have a 
backup, maybe even a spare machine if things burn down badly (never 
happned for me). One of my machines has btrfs and I do snapshots before 
upgrading, and it has always been easier to select out broken packages 
and pull those from testing to fix breakage.

I do not recommend testing unless in the very last weeks before a 
release for security reasons, and when you're using testing you cannot 
easily go back to older package versions because there is only 
snapshot.d.o to pull from.

Greetings
Marc