Marc Sherman <msherman@???> writes:
| 3) Debian's incredibly long stable release cycles mean that there are
| very significant periods of time where Debian will be shipping as
| "stable" a very outdated (and possibly buggy) version of Exim.
|
| This _will_ be a problem for you if you choose to install Debian stable.
| Options for avoiding it are running Debian unstable (but then you have
| to worry about regular updates and random breakage), or Debian testing
From the text above one might deduce that this is a serious problem.
In part yes, but 99% of it can be easily "fixed".
1) Run "testing". You get almost all new features in timely manner. No
breakage. Nowadays security team supports testing as well:
...Supporting Testing Security. Joey Hess announced the beginning of
full security support for Debian's testing distribution. The Debian
testing security team has spent the past year building the team and
creating infrastructure. Advisories for security fixes will only be
announced for updates that are made available through the new
repository and don't reach testing through normal propagation from
unstable. <
http://www.us.debian.org/News/weekly/2005/37/>
2) It is _very_ rare to encounter breakage even with "unstable". If
some package breaks during upgrade, within week there is a correction,
because developer will provide fix quickly for these high level bugs.
For the record: that may happen 1-3 times a year but, not necessarily.
It depends how you run you run apt-update(1): it might be bad luck to
get that "wrong" version. If updated a week later, a newer version in
the update repository would have solved the problem.
3) Running "stable" is obsolete by all standards if stable means
running secure web server, feature rich MTA with virus scanners up to
date and other spam tools. Until Debian comes with a plan of about 6
month "stable" releases, don't count on this branch.
But if "stable" is used (works also for testing), there are methods to
selectively be up to date with particular important packages It's
called APT pinning.
<
http://www.argon.org/~roderick/apt-pinning.html>
RECOMMENDATATION
Use (1) for servers. Keep some package more up to date from unstable
with the "pinning" technique. Works great.
Jari
