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Comment by __s | Hacker News Reader

Curious why they didn't go with sid. Maybe because Arch is intended to be rolling release, so it's less likely that regressions are overlooked as "well that's what sid is for, catching regressions"

(I use Arch on my desktop & WSL w/ Debian testing at work)

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The drawback to using sid in this way is that every 2 years during the release freeze, regular uploads to it taper off or halt. Depending on the maintainer, uploads of new releases etc. may continue into the experimental branch, but those packages have to be pulled in manually, and continuing to upload in this manner is not always done. In principle, though, sid+experimental has the capacity to be analogous to a true rolling release.

Debian testing is the closest thing Debian has to a "proper" rolling release. It comes with some mild drawbacks like half-baked security support (sometimes security fixes can get tangled with complex transitions and thus be somewhat delayed compared to sid) and the converse issue of long feature/transition freezes when approaching a stable release. But it's not clear that Arch is to be preferred in practice.

A lot of people have an irrational fear of Sid because it's called Unstable.

And yet the use "rolling" distributions that often contains exactly the same software.

I think many steer clear of sid because of the security policy:

Please note that security updates for "unstable" distribution are not managed by the security team. Hence, "unstable" does not get security updates in a timely manner. [1]

[1] https://www.debian.org/releases/sid/

This phrasing is very misleading.

Sid/Unstable and Testing track upstream releases.

If an upstream developer releases a new version to fix a vulnerability, Sid gets the upstream fix just like other rolling distro.

If a version in Testing has a vulnerability and Testing entered a pre-release freeze the fix gets backported.

If a version in Stable has a vulnerability the fix gets backported.

This is designed to provide the "best of both worlds".

While this does cover quite a bit, I think there is a little more that the security team does in terms of coordination, encouraging or even making timely package updates.

It’s understandable that some would fall on either side of being ok with that gap or not.

I haven't been regularly using Debian in about 15 years now, so I don't know how things are nowadays. But back in the day when I was running Debian unstable on my desktop, temporary breakages in dependencies or in individual packages weren't that uncommon. I think sometimes some functionality was broken for a while when there was some kind of a transition going on.

Those were entirely understandable given sid's nature, and it was much more reliable and functional than one would have expected from an "unstable" active development OS distro. It wasn't unstable in the sense of crashing or being generally buggy, and it was generally quite possible to use it as an everyday desktop.

It did, at least back then, require more active administration and a corresponding mindset than a fire-and-forget stable release would, though.

Sid might of course work as a basis for a distro for someone like Valve, but I think they'd need to do something similar to what Ubuntu does with freezes and weeding out issues before releases, or at the least have some kind of a delay before updates were pushed to non-testing devices if they based directly on the unstable release.

From [1]: This [Debian Sid] distribution will never get released; instead, packages from it will propagate into testing and then into a real release.

sid is not a release, it is a staging area for packages to roll into a release.

[1] https://www.debian.org/releases/sid/

This is pretty misleading. sid is a "release", it's just "always released".

You can absolutely upgrade to sid, run it, and get daily updates, at the much higher risk of breakage of your system.

er...what?

"This distribution will never get released; instead, packages from it will propagate into testing and then into a real release." is a literal quote from https://www.debian.org/releases/sid/

I understand what it says, but it's misleading. The packages are "released" in the sense that they are in a repository that you can use to install a functional OS. See for yourself. http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/sid/main/

"Rolling release" is a bit of an oxymoron.

"continuously updated and never released" would be more correct.

It's like saying that a git repository that never gets version tags is "released on every commit".

not at all involved here, but i'd think managment of the full system from source (as might be needed for low level support e.g. kernel/libc patches) would be easier on arch than debian.

Too bad for most linuces we still cant build the base system in a single step like we have been able to do since the dawn of time in traditional unices.

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