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Neil Williams wrote: > On Thu, 2008-11-06 at 13:41 +0000, "Philip Radford" wrote: > >> 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. Philip, Is there a specific feature of PHP or Apache that you need which isn't in Etch? I think this is the right question. The point of stable is to ensure that software you write/configure/"bundle together" works, and continues to work without modification, until that release dies. Whilst plenty of folks say unstable works, unstable doesn't crash etc, this misses the point. Unstable may both break completely (I've had it mess up a box to the point where I needed to reinstall hundreds of packages to get working again - okay it was only a handful of commands but it took many hours to run), or more crucially may break your applications by changing something important. As others have said, this close to releasing Lenny (Testing), where it has less critical bugs that Etch (Stable), there is a case for installing Lenny (although there is a lot of churn despite the alleged freeze). I suspect that most web servers would be better of running Etch because if there is a problem, other people will have solved it and documented the fix. MySQL and PHP are in my experience just the kind of things to have non-backward compatible changes in unstable, so when thing break you find migrating back to a working version means running unstable as it was on a specific day (or exporting the database and trying to import into an earlier versions of MySQL, or rewriting PHP code), and you lose the ability to apply new security related patches until you address the relevant issues. Complex PHP installs likely also want some security work done on them. Debian (afaik) still installs with a version of the PHP.INI file which isn't suitable for use on a live server (think developer version - display_errors is on, and the security settings are weak), and you may want Suhosin or similar installed. Things like Suhosin will depend on the version of PHP, and unstable will likely upgrade PHP and a few days later get a compatible Suhosin. Similarly new PHP or MySQL releases may need additions to the configuration files (and the php.ini will likely be heavily changed by yourself). I would also try to avoid backports, and other repositories if you can. Backports is probably the least painful, but all of these make it harder to upgrade when the time comes, and your stable release is no longer getting security support. I know I picked up PHP and MySQL from a third party repository with Sarge, and ended up having to switch all my PHP from mod-php5 to CGI at one point. Now if you'd said LAPP (Linux, Apache, Postgres and Perl) I might have a different view ;) I don't think the group has a distro of choice. We do have some very vocal Debian fans - but hey when you have a good thing and it costs nothing to share it.... -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html