On Sat, 2006-08-19 at 14:24, Timothy Murphy wrote: > 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"? That's not the situation I'm describing. You have something working, apply what you expect to be updates and what worked before no longer works. That's 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. They many not stop the machine from working, but they can and have stopped previously working applications from working. If that application is the reason you have the machine in the first place, the effect is the same. And if your job depends on the applications running, you learn to be cautious about making changes. On the other hand you can't ignore security-related updates and certain bugfixes. > >> 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". It means that interfaces don't change and existing documented behavior doesn't change. > To me, "instability" means that something bad is occurring > in an unpredictable way, eg if the computer sometimes boots > and sometimes does not. If your application runs before an update and doesn't afterwards... > > 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. I mean that there are times you want new features and changes but you don't want them as a surprise along with things you have to apply like security updates. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
