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On Thu, 2008-11-06 at 13:41 +0000, "Philip Radford" wrote: > I am writing knowing that Debian (or its derivatives) is the OS of choice > within the group. > > Just got myself a brand new dedicated server as the next logical step up > from a shared hosting platform. Servers should use stable, or at most testing. Specific packages can be backported to stable and the 10 day delay in migration from unstable into testing will save you a lot of downtime. Right now, servers should consider migrating to 'lenny' as the codename in the sources lists. > I decided to go with Debian 4.0 (Etch) 64bit as the OS of choice and was > wondering if anyone had any advice on whether to install packages from the > stable or unstable branch. Intel or AMD? (ia64 or amd64) > I have currently gone with the unstable branch after reading the advice on > the debian web site. ? Eh? What advice? The website does not recommend unstable for servers - unstable is not "recommended" in most cases. > I am keen to utilise the latest versions of Apache and > PHP for my web applications which work in a LAMP environment. That is the *wrong* reason to use unstable. Unstable is for development, not deployment. Run unstable at home but only stable or testing remotely. Unstable *WILL* break, that is why we call it unstable. It is allowed to break and it regularly does break just as soon as the release freeze ends. It takes a significant amount of time for unstable to settle down after the post-release frenzy - during this time, the thing servers should be running is the just-released stable (which at that point is still very close to testing). As soon as Etch was released, the cry went up "Yey! let's get back to breaking unstable!". It will happen again with Lenny. Getting the release right takes such an amount of time that loads of updates and new versions cannot be uploaded, cannot be fully tested. When all those pending uploads are actually made, things will break. Promise. > What are the chances of coming unstuck in the future if I continue to use > the unstable branch? Right now? Unstable ~= testing == Lenny because of the freeze so you will get a completely misleading impression. Immediately after the Lenny release? 90% chance of failure of unstable in at least one LAMP package or direct dependency, 100% chance of some failure elsewhere (probably something related to the perl 5.10 transition or the python transitions). It will only settle down when all the uploaded packages have all completed their migration into testing. i.e. testing is where you want to be for new stuff that actually works. I think that is usually an important criterion for a server but your mileage may vary (if you are mad). -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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