Les Mikesell wrote: >> You keep making these statements about "instability", >> but what exactly do you mean by this word? > > It has two different but related meanings. One is pure > rate-of-change. The other is detrimental changes where > something that previously worked is broken in an update. Well, I don't think "unstable" is the correct term to use for this. A person who is dead is not unstable. They are very stable. >> Windows and Linux used to be relatively unstable, >> but both have been completely stable, in the normal meaning of this term, >> for years, in my experience. > > Either you have been lucky or you don't expect much then. I've > had both windows and linux updates break previously working > things in the last few years. As I have explained, I would not use the word "unstable" to describe this. I would say "the update does not work". If you bought a new car and it did not work, would you say that it was "unstable"? Incidentally, I have never known a Windows-2000 or Windows-XP upgrade not to work. I've known them to do things I didn't want them to do, eg add unwanted "security" features, but I've never known them to stop the machine working. >> When you use the term "unstable" would you mind explaining >> what you mean by it, please. > > With a unix-like system, stability means that you can write some > scripts to perform certain functions and go away for a few > years doing nothing but system bugfix and security updates > and come back to find it still doing its job. That seems to me yet another meaning. I don't think "stable" is the same as "unchanging". To me, "instability" means that something bad is occurring in an unpredictable way, eg if the computer sometimes boots and sometimes does not. > That's worked > for me so far with RH 7.3 and CentOS 3.x, and not much else. > The need for the bugfix/security updates is the killer here > because other distributions have allowed additional changes > that affect behavior to be slipstreamed into the updates that > you must apply. In fedora these changes are an expected feature, > not a bug... I'm not sure what you mean by this, but if an update did not work I would say that the update did not work, not that the system was unstable. -- Timothy Murphy e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland
