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Re: [LUG] libc6 & Debian testing

 

Keith Abraham wrote:
> 
> Nope. I just find such words as "critical" a bit frightening. Perhaps I'm
> being naive in understanding a bug status of "critical" (and "grave")
> as akin to their use in a hospital?

I don't think the categorisation of bugs in Debian is terribly
scientific, the reporter specifies the category, then the maintainer
regrades them as he thinks appropriate (or as the guidelines demand).

Experience is that outside of "stable" it is not uncommon to have
packages with bugs of this severity turn up fairly regularly (daily at
times).

Of course one takes it with a grain of salt, because presumably all the
more cutting edge (than Debian stable) GNU/Linux distros have pretty
much the same bugs, and there are presumably plenty of such bugs left
undiscovered that human nature tends to lead us not to worry as much about.

Human nature also tends to mean people report the severity of the bugs
they find as higher than they deserve, because if you hit the bug,
inevitably it is in your way, the fact 10,000 other people used the
package without hitting that bug doesn't occur to the guy whose computer
isn't doing what it should. I'm guilty of this, but I try hard to
correct for the natural bias.

I guess if you want to minimise such issues you opt for "stable".

> ... so I'll do an "dist-upgrade" after my next backup.

Very wise.

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