Re: x86_64 or i386?

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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


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