Is the concept of a release still important? OpenBSD did away with the CDs for instance, so what is the value of calling a tag for a particular set of packages (versions) a release?
The only time I cared was when I installed from scratch on a new computer (too much hazle to mirror and existing drive and figure out how to switch from bios to efi etc), and last time, stable did not support my hardware, testing and nightly did not work due to being in transit to release. In other words the lack of any suitable installer meant I was forced to use another distribution (Ubuntu).
I have tried both testing and unstable and both broke for me at inconvenient times, usually I was not the first to notice, and with some effort usually able to find a fix or work-around. Stable plus backports work well, although as a rule, you are stuck on old packages unless (at least the way I use it) explicitly upgrade a particular package. It is configuration that I have to manually sync between machines.
Other than varnish (3rd party repo which is going away I believe) I have no issues with automated (i.e apt-cron) updates for many years.
What I would love to see is a rolling release that is non-breaking. If something breaks, roll that particular package back. I don't know what the particular mechanism that would be, but the ticket system (which is a wealth of data) could be an input along with local configuration.
Push upgrades. With stable, security fixes, is a feed, but it would nice if I don't need to jury-rig something myself to minimize my exposure window. With rolling releases, it would be nice to get that faster (or if you prefer delayed by a configurable amount).
The only time I cared was when I installed from scratch on a new computer (too much hazle to mirror and existing drive and figure out how to switch from bios to efi etc), and last time, stable did not support my hardware, testing and nightly did not work due to being in transit to release. In other words the lack of any suitable installer meant I was forced to use another distribution (Ubuntu).
I have tried both testing and unstable and both broke for me at inconvenient times, usually I was not the first to notice, and with some effort usually able to find a fix or work-around. Stable plus backports work well, although as a rule, you are stuck on old packages unless (at least the way I use it) explicitly upgrade a particular package. It is configuration that I have to manually sync between machines.
Other than varnish (3rd party repo which is going away I believe) I have no issues with automated (i.e apt-cron) updates for many years.
What I would love to see is a rolling release that is non-breaking. If something breaks, roll that particular package back. I don't know what the particular mechanism that would be, but the ticket system (which is a wealth of data) could be an input along with local configuration.
Push upgrades. With stable, security fixes, is a feed, but it would nice if I don't need to jury-rig something myself to minimize my exposure window. With rolling releases, it would be nice to get that faster (or if you prefer delayed by a configurable amount).