Is Debian Stable getting more unstable?

[Arnox]

Recently, there was a breaking change with how Debian handles the firmware. I'm not sure why the Debian team thought to push such a drastic change through to Stable instead of pushing it through Unstable or Testing first, and this isn't the first time recently that this has happened either if I recall correctly. There was a similar incident where a broken change to Chromium's password manager was pushed through to Stable as well. Now, in that latter case, it was more understandable that that change went through as security updates for browsers are incredibly important, but regardless, even putting aside these two incidents, I also recall a time, again recently, where Debian pushed through Nvidia drivers that were straight up not functional for a lot of users.

So, are we just going through a transitionary period with a lot of packages here, or is the QC for Debian simply beginning to slip?

[dolphin_oracle]

Debian didn’t push that change to stable. We pushed the change to our Ahs repo without realizing the change in packaging.

The nvidia driver thing is a different story. That is on Debian. The nvidia drivers were actually due to a kernel change. Why they didn’t wait for working nvidia drivers before pushing the kernel update is beyond me. That’s what we do with kernels pushed to Ahs.

[MadMax]

I have the feeling development in general is speeding up a lot in recent years. Nvidia drivers are a prominent example for that, but also the migrations to Pipewire and Wayland are happening fast - maybe a little too fast for my taste - at the moment. There's bound to be some bugs and errors made here and there, even in the rock-solid Debian stable branch...

[Arnox]

Did some more researching and found this really good discussion on the Debian forums about the lately buggy point releases. https://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php ... 4&start=20

Apparently, a ton of these bugs are due to proprietary vendors being sloppy and/or uncooperative. Nevertheless though, there is still a lot of debate regarding why Debian can't simply just delay a point release for a little bit until these breaking bugs were fixed. Personally, I'm on the side of delaying point releases until they're ready.

By the way, as a fellow forum admin, I hate the practice of thread-locking.

[oops]

I have the feeling development in general is speeding up a lot in recent years. Nvidia drivers are a prominent example for that, but also the migrations to Pipewire and Wayland are happening fast - maybe a little too fast for my taste - at the moment. There's bound to be some bugs and errors made here and there, even in the rock-solid Debian stable branch...

What speeds things up is the security (Pipewire and Wayland) and modernity of IAs (with the Cuda Nvidia GPU).

[nosoynadie]

Did some more researching and found this really good discussion on the Debian forums about the lately buggy point releases. https://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php ... 4&start=20

Apparently, a ton of these bugs are due to proprietary vendors being sloppy and/or uncooperative. Nevertheless though, there is still a lot of debate regarding why Debian can't simply just delay a point release for a little bit until these breaking bugs were fixed. Personally, I'm on the side of delaying point releases until they're ready.

By the way, as a fellow forum admin, I hate the practice of thread-locking.

The best is the enemy of the good, perfectionism paralyzes. Updating brings new problems, not updating keeps old problems.


About... "So, are we just going through a transitionary period with a lot of packages here, or is the QC for Debian simply beginning to slip?"

Debian is an organization of limited and imperfect people in a complex and imperfect world. It hasn't started to slip, it has never stopped.

It's my opinion.
I apologize for my bad English

[Arnox]

The best is the enemy of the good, perfectionism paralyzes. Updating brings new problems, not updating keeps old problems.

I get that, but it gets to be an actual massive problem when updating makes the ENTIRE system non-functional. This has happened multiple times. If it happens again, I'm going to see if I can get a petition through on the Debian side to start delaying point releases when a breaking bug is found.

Debian means stable. This is not Fedora. We are not focused on the new. Putting in the new in an already existing Debian Stable release can wait so we don't have any regressions.

[paulfsams]

If you are using "stable-backports," it can sometimes cause problems. But you may not be doing that. In Debian, stable-backports are pinned to 100 and you have to specifically choose the backports. I recently had a problem with the Brave Browser which is not a part of debian, it's 3rd party. But like Google-Chrome it will leave an entry in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/. But yes, sometimes, not often, Debian can glitch. Debian Stable is almost always rock solid. You may already know that MX Linux is built on top of Debian Stable, but they also include some of their own software. In my early years, I just couldn't figure out how to install Debian, and discovered Mepis Linux, from which came antix, and now the excellent MX-Linux.