Fast world, fast updates
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:date: 2012-03-27T06:18:43Z
:category: blog
:tags: linux
:url: blog/2012/3/27/fast-world-fast-updates.html
:save_as: blog/2012/3/27/fast-world-fast-updates.html
:status: published
:author: Gergely Polonkai

We live in a fast world, that’s for sure.  When I first heard about Ubuntu Linux and their goals,
I was happy: they gave a Debian to everyone, but in different clothes.  It had fresh software in
it, and even they gave support of a kind.  It was easy to install and use, even if one had no
Linux experience before.  So people liked it.  I’ve even installed it on some of my servers
because of the new package versions that came more often.  Thus I got an up to date system.
However, it had a price.  After a while, security updates came more and more often, and when I had
a new critical update every two or three days, I’ve decided to move back to Debian.  Fortunately I
did this at the time of a new release, so I didn’t really loose any features.

After a few years passed, even Debian is heading this very same way.  But as I see, the cause is
not the same.  It seems that upstream software is hitting these bugs, and even the Debian guys
don’t have the time to check for them.  At the time of a GNOME version bump (yes, GNOME 3 is a
really big one for the UN\*X-like OSes), when hundreds of packages need to be checked, security
bugs show off more often.  On the other hand however, Debian is releasing a new security update
every day (I had one on each of the last three days).  This, of course, is good from one point of
view as we get a system that is more secure, but most administrators don’t have maintenance
windows this often.  I can think of some alternatives like Fedora, but do I really have to change?
Dear fellow developers, please code more carefully instead!
