The core of this idea is to stop making stable releases, and focus on the subset of our users who are happy using testing (or unstable).
Pros:
- We're good at releasing those distributions on a daily basis.
Cons:
Testing will be broken at various stages. See DebianTesting for a good example of this.
- Production environments need a well-defined stable release that doesn't change all the time.
- There is a need to have machines with identical software versions, even if installed at a different times (ex., for giving support, for replicating environments, etc.)
- There is no security support yet.
Give up all hope for Debian adoption in the enterprise unless we make a serious commitment to security updates for testing.
See ReleaseProposals for alternatives.
Q: What other distro offers as much stability as Debian stable does? What distro will servers use?
A1: For me, it's down to Debian Stable or RHEL. I don't like Red Hat's way, debian is far easier to admin. If debian stable drops off, we'd probably move to Fedora Core, or Cent OS perhaps. RHEL is too expensive for us. In an enterprise situation, you need stability and predictability. 6-month upgrade cycles with mission-critical servers is NOT an option. -- DamianMurphy