I especially love how “testing” is for “general users”! :D

One thing I never understood about Debian, why do they create their +debian brainshat patches, and only 'backport’ security fixes? I mean, especially in PHP it makes zero sense to install PHP 5.3.3-7+squeeze3 instead of just 5.3.9 because obviously PHP is not committed to providing stability in a release line, like 5.2.x, 5.3.x, etc. but instead incorporate bleeding edge changes on every release.

Now it sounds absolutely saner to just get some random guys on the internet to patch in what they think seems like a good idea ( like http://www.debian.org/security/2008/dsa-1571 – whoops, I accidentally the patch ) instead of just letting the maintainers of the product care for providing stable releases.

Even better, as for MySQL, 5.0.51a is the default with 5.1.49 available. Not to mention that 5.0.x isn’t supported anymore, and 5.0.92 was the last release, they lack an uncountable number of security fixes and bug fixes that 5.0.92 would have.

Providing 5.5.x as an option – not even the default or something – isn’t available either. 5.5.x provides a performance gain of up to 360% on Linux and 600% on Windows. Providing a 5.5.x build isn’t rocket science, in fact compiling MySQL is darn easy.

So why?

Yeah, because grandma knows how to fill out a bug report.

Something tells me Debian does NOT have the automatic crash reporting that Windows and OSX have.

Oh for f*cks sake, recommding testing for general users, what could possibly go wrong?

Also, what the f*ck does “Designed for Debian” mean? That Debian is so f*cked up that software written for other unix-like operating systems can’t be ported to it without a sh*tload of Debian-specific hacks?

Where’s the unit testing? Where’s the integration testing? Those can all be automated. Oh wait, they’re too busy “developing” user-testable code.

What do you have against debian patches? Don’t you remember how wonderful were things, when they patched OpenSSL?

Actually, if they had a work-flow in which a selected subset of eyeballs did nothing else except read the code and try to break security, Debian would be a pretty revolutionary distro. Overnight it would become almost useful.

Should I enter a feature request for this?

“I especially love how “testing” is for “general users”! :D”

Do the Debian maintainers have the same approach, or this is yet another linux youth trying to spread linux no matter what?

I actually like Debian, because it’s one of the few distros that have a somewhat sane release cycle, and because it doesn’t pretend to be ready for grandma. So, it can be somewhat useful if you have a PIII/P4-Williamete seedbox and don’t want to spend 100Euros for a Windows license, just to have it run a torrent client and firefox.