Monday, September 27, 2004

Debian in Corporations

I think Debian stable is a great platform to work with servers but I think that corporate workstations will need more current software because of more frequent hardware turnover. An adept server administrator can backport any needed packages or make decisions on stability and choose to use the testing branch.

Debian already has a staging ground for stable, the testing branch. It is easily available for anyone to install and includes a lot of solid software. I think we need to ask what does stable have that testing does not.

One thing missing in testing is security updates. Debian is not committed to publishing security updates for testing. Which is a policy based upon their scarcity of resources. Can we correct this by focusing a group to provide but if this keeps us from using testing all of the time then can we correct it? Is this something that another group of volunteers can help?

Testing is also missing stability which is obvious. However, we have to remember that software will always be untested and unstable until the software is tested, bug reports are documented, and then bugs are fixed.

I'm sure I am missing other reasons why testing looks so tempting but cannot be used in a corporate environment.

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