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Lysander wrote: It was a very good post - I think a better link title [esp for new users like me] would be something like "[help on] deciding whether to upgrade after a full freeze".

Sure, the original entry was mainly a placeholder until I got home, but that seems to have a nice ring to it. The idea is to help people who need the info, so any feedback is great.

dasein wrote:One last tangential point: talk of "live testing" post-release is utter nonsense and betrays a complete ignorance of Debian's release cycle. The "live testing" phase of Testing's existence occurs between releases, not after a release. Once a new Stable is released, it does not get routine bug fixes

Abusive ... and simply wrong.

Once Stable has been released it in effect enters a phase of widespread live/operational testing by the general public and from that additional bugs will be identified by such broad real-world usage. Fixes for those bugs are either released asap when a security-issue/major bug, released as part of the next point release https://www.debian.org/News/2017/20170114 if a significant bug, or left as-is if a minor bug. Clearly my quoted 'live testing' description was in reference to that post release period.

Wow.

Don't you ever get tired of being wrong?

It's tragic when someone is incapable of recognizing that the "evidence" they cite actually supports the contrary position.

Take for example the point-release announcement for Debian 8.7, cited in the previous post (https://www.debian.org/News/2017/20170114)...

The vast majority of the 87 entries identified as "miscellaneous bugfixes" in that announcement were deployed in response to 94 distinct security issues, identifiable by the acronym CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures). Among the specific vulnerabilities addressed by these "miscellaneous" fixes: overflow conditions, memory leaks, and arbitrary code execution.

No one disputes that Stable gets security fixes. But Stable does not receive routine bugfixes, which helps to explain why the current Stable has over 200 RC bugs open against it.

As seen at a recent "Science March":

Since I was in the neighborhood anyway...

Ardouos wrote:The idea is to help people who need the info, so any feedback is great.

I'm deeply flattered that you thought my post was worthy of a siglink, even for just the next few months.

My only suggestion regarding link text might be to frame it as the question it's meant to answer. Something like "Switch to Stretch now or wait until release?"

dasein wrote:Since I was in the neighborhood anyway...

Ardouos wrote:The idea is to help people who need the info, so any feedback is great.

I'm deeply flattered that you thought my post was worthy of a siglink, even for just the next few months.

My only suggestion regarding link text might be to frame it as the question it's meant to answer. Something like "Switch to Stretch now or wait until release?"

I've framed this in a different way as you can see from my sig, since it relates, and will relate, to releases other than just Stretch.

Daesin wrote: My only suggestion regarding link text might be to frame it as the question it's meant to answer. Something like "Switch to Stretch now or wait until release?"

I feel for now it would be best to use Stretch as it is close to release, I will then change it to something a bit more generic after release if I feel the sig is still needed... Which it generally does every time testing is frozen.

A bug is a failing to operate as intended. Some bugs can be exploited, others are purely cosmetic. Bugs with security or severe operational implications are looked at to be fixed/rolled out to the current stable, those that are cosmetic don't.

Nice pic BTW, looks like you were enjoying yourself.

Ardouos wrote:Which it generally does every time testing is frozen.

In fairness, two years of intervening cruft is a formidable obstacle. (Let's face it: I was willing to retype the answer rather than find my answer from two years ago.) During those two years, no one has occasion to ponder the question because it's just not relevant. And during those two years, new Debianites who've never experienced a freeze do turn up.

P.S. Purely pedantic and tangential point: the quote you attributed to lysander is actually me.

dasein wrote: In fairness, two years of intervening cruft is a formidable obstacle. (Let's face it: I was willing to retype the answer rather than find my answer from two years ago.) During those two years, no one has occasion to ponder the question because it's just not relevant. And during those two years, new Debianites who've never experienced a freeze do turn up.

True, I tend to find that I do get more results by filtering through a search engine for this forum, rather than using the search builtin. It may will be a permanent sig if nothing I find more useful turns up.

It is such a shame that we cannot use more than 5 urls in a sig.

dasein wrote: P.S. Purely pedantic and tangential point: the quote you attributed to lysander is actually me.

Sorry, not sure how that happened. Thank you for pointing it out, as credit is always where it is due.

Ardouos wrote:It may will be a permanent sig if nothing I find more useful turns up.

That's actually one of the reasons I changed the topic line for that particular post--to make it easier to find two years from now. ;-P

Ardouos wrote:

dasein wrote:P.S. Purely pedantic and tangential point: the quote you attributed to lysander is actually me.

Sorry, not sure how that happened. Thank you for pointing it out, as credit is always where it is due.

I was thinking more along the lines of blame, but hey, to-MAY-to/to-MAH-to.

As for how it happens (and it's happened to me), I blame gremlins.

I had this little-used Jessie partition on another system and decided to upgrade it to Stretch, just for fun. It wasn't. I don't know if the theme engines or applications are just in transition (which is my first guess), or if it's the way they're going to look for now on, but it was uh-glee. It threw me off because I had tried it in a VM back in August and Stretched looked just like Jessie. Guess that's why they call it unstable

I've been in Stretch for quite a while and i haven't experienced any breakage at all, just be prepared with your Super-Debian Engineer Toolkit and you will be ready to go.

I started using Stretch in January. Have had zero problems with it.

It don't think it's too early to move on from current stable, unless you're using Debian for production purposes.

Stretch is quite different from Jessie. That's normal with new releases. I have a /var/mail log with lots of changes in the way bits are configured and used. So, do a full backup before attempting an upgrade. I recommend cloning the entire Jessie, including Grub, to a spare drive and checking it for operation. Doing so provides a drop-in replacement when things go south.