"With Etch you get the best package manager around in APT, a rock solid stable system, and the ability to tinker with the desktop all that you want - without having the procedure become too arcane. If you are familiar with Linux then I would strongly recommend you try out Debian Etch - just an awesome release by the Debian group."
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Member since:2005-06-29
Debian always changes the new releases to "stable" and the old stable release becomes "oldstable." They've been doing it that way for 10 years or more. If your apt sources said "stable" then yes, when Etch was released and you do an apt-get whatever, that meant Etch. If your apt sources had said sarge instead, then it wouldn't have happened.
Member since:2006-01-13
Member since:2005-07-08
Yep, that problem would be more related to poor or confusing Debian documentation(?), or more likely (sorry to say this) poor understanding and system administration.
It is clearly stated in all Debian documentiation what it means to have either the release code name (like sarge or etch) in the sources.list file or just "stable". Stable is the same as sarge only as long as stable is sarge, when stable changes to etch everything is going to get updated. Many want it just that way. But it is easy to avoid if one wants to stay in the old stable.
Member since:2005-12-31
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2006-01-24
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-07-06
Your ignorance regarding Debian's naming conventions and update methodology doesn't give you the right to shout that. If you take your sources from "stable" and don't care about anything else, than you can't be surprised when such things happen, unless you havbe absolutely no clue.
You say that's a production server. Who is in charge of it ? If (s)he hasn't so much clue about Debian to check what's in the sources.list, what else can one expect ? Geez.
All these things are out there in the open, not secrets by any means, documented and known by everyone who knows Debian only a slight better than a potato farmer knows the Soyuz's engine.
Other than that, Debian stable distribution upgrades are not that frequent that you couldn't know about it well ahead
Member since:2006-09-21
Member since:
2006-01-13
Let me tell you about MY experience with Etch. I have sarge installed on a dedicated server at a data center. Last night we are doing the usual apt-get to download security updates for sarge, when, to our dismay sarge starts automatically updating to Etch! Now we haven't tested Etch at all, so rolling out these changes on a production system is UNACCEPTABLE. So we try to cancel the changes before things go straight to hell, which leaves the dedicated server in a foobar state. After looking around at what went wrong we discovered the default in sources.list was 'stable' and not 'sarge'. Pretty lame if you ask me. When they changed 'stable' from 'sarge' to 'etch' it tried to auto upgrade the distro. Our debian system was up 500+ days prior to this incident.
I'm not impressed, not at all.