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Debian Testing branch is always rolling except for a couple weeks/months before a freeze for a release.

I suppose if you really needed to keep rolling you could temporarily switch to unstable.

"Seems like a needless risk and pain."

And the purpose of the freeze is to iron all that out so it doesn't happen.

(edited to add, I'm sad seeing OP get downvoted. His post history shows hes an Arch guy and likely genuinely doesn't understand release tagging. As a Debian user since '97 I am not surprised that there exist both people who don't know the peculiar arcana of release tagging and there are people who are experts at it, so his confusion adds a little value to the conversation. Down arrow should mean a decrement of net worth of the conversation. People are learning things from his mistake, a down arrow is not an assessment that OP got a technical test question wrong. And I had to edit this about ten times to phrase it correctly.)



I don't know much about Debian. I may have slightly mischaracterized things because I don't understand. That's why I asked.

I am getting the impression that Debian Testing isn't really used in the sense of, "Be a nice volunteer and run this thing that has problems so we can fix them," which is what (to me) is implied by the name "testing." Rather, it seems to be "here is a (mostly) rolling release version of Debian, if that's what you want." In other words, it almost seems like "Debian Rolling" might be a more apt name, in a sense.

The thing is, as a user of Arch Linux (without a ton of other experience), I just don't have problems with a rolling release. For me, things don't break, and it just works. So it feels to me like Debian's whole release philosophy is based around the idea that things have to break all the time and be fixed carefully, and that just doesn't sync up with my experience. So I'm trying to figure out what is missing from my worldview.

Thanks for defending me. I think might be somebody (maybe multiple) who doesn't like me and just downvotes all my comments, but I don't have any hard evidence.


I think (could be wrong) that Debian Sid is the nearest to your idea of Debian Rolling. Debian Testing is a testbed for the next release, especially when the freeze happens (and just before freeze when people are trying to get patches in).




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