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Comment by c0l0 | Hacker News Reader

No, Debian releases do not "break just as often". If you really couldn't got from release n to n+1 via apt(-get|itude) due to new packages migrating into testing, this would be a release-critical bug, and have to be corrected before the n+1 release were to be marked stable.

There are certain situations where a Debian upgrade will break a specific package - maybe due to upstream messing up really badly, or maybe due to some unusual way of configuring it. But in that case, the release notes that Debian publishes for each release would cover that particular problem for sure. Mistakes happen, and noone's perfect - but Debian tries to be, and they're very near that ideal in terms of ensuring your ability to upgrade your installation.

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Fir me Debian releases are broken to start with. Fresh install of 10.3 resulted in gnome desktop that could not use gui sudo and some package with broken dependencies. Replaced with xubuntu that just worked. This was not the first time I tried Debian with similar results. The "stable" part just means that they distribute an old version of some software and not that it all works.

I thought Debian also moved to a fixed schedule release policy? Doesn't it make it harder to stick to a "release when ready"?

Personally, I don't think that Ubuntu is less perfect that Debian wrt. upgrade quality, it's just that (it seems to me that) the workforce is not as large, and that they also have other projects on their plate (not to say it should be that way or not, I'm merely trying to state the facts).

No, it makes "release when ready" easier, since the entire distribution doesn't have to wait for that single software release becau the next distro release is not that far away. At least that's how it works for Java. (I'm not that deep into Linux distros.)

How is that supposed to work? I understand that it possible to pull the plug on packages which are not ready at time T, but it also means pulling the plug on all the packages that depend on it.

So if libreoffice depends on package P, and that one is not ready, is Debian going to simply drop libreoffice until next release?

Nothing is dropped.

At a very high level, it works like this:

New versions of stuff go into Unstable. When they've been tested a while they get pushed to Testing. Periodically Testing is frozen and branched into a new Stable release. If a package doesn't make it into Testing before the freeze then it's out of luck and has to wait for the next release.

For example, assume libreoffice 1.0 and libfoo 1.0 are in Unstable, Testing and Stable. If libreoffice 1.1 comes out and depends on libfoo 1.1, but libfoo 1.1 is broken in Unstable, then libfoo 1.1 and libreoffice 1.1 won't be pushed to Testing until the issue is fixed. If they don't make it into Testing before the release freeze then the next stable will ship with libreoffice 1.0.

After the freeze, when the libfoo 1.1 is fixed in Unstable, then libreoffice 1.1 and libfoo 1.1 will go into Testing and wait for the next Stable to get branched.

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