But I doubt it, they will lazily backport these patches to create some frankenstein one-off version and be done with it.
Before anyone says "tHaT's wHaT sTaBlE iS fOr": they have literally shipped straight-up broken packages before, because fixing it would somehow make it not "stable". They would rather ship useless, broken code than something too new. It's crazy.
The thing to complain about is if the version in testing is ancient.
That whole model dates to before automated testing was even really a thing, and no one knew how to do QA; your QA was all the people willing to run your code and report bugs, and that took time. Not to mention, you think the C of today is bad? Have you looked at old C?
And the disadvantage is that backporting is manual, resource intensive, and prone to error - and the projects that are the most heavily invested in that model are also the projects that are investing the least in writing tests and automated test infrastructure - because engineering time is a finite resource.
On top of that, the backport model heavily discourages the kinds of refactorings and architectural cleanups that would address bugs systemically and encourage a whack-a-mole approach - because in the backport model, people want fixes they can backport. And then things just get worse and worse.
We'd all be a lot better off if certain projects took some of the enthusiasm with which they throw outrageous engineering time at backports, and spent at least some of that on automated testing and converting to Rust.
That's not what it's about.
What it's about is, newer versions change things. A newer version of OpenSSH disables GSSAPI by default when an older version had it enabled. You don't want that as an automatic update because it will break in production for anyone who is actually using it. So instead the change goes into the testing release and the user discovers that in their test environment before rolling out the new release into production.
> On top of that, the backport model heavily discourages the kinds of refactorings and architectural cleanups that would address bugs systemically and encourage a whack-a-mole approach - because in the backport model, people want fixes they can backport.
They're not alternatives to each other. The stable release gets the backported patch, the next release gets the refactor.
But that's also why you want the stable release. The refactor is a larger change, so if it breaks something you want to find it in test rather than production.
Fucking Debian patches defaults in OpenSSH code so it behaves differently than upstream.
They shouldn't legally be allowed to call it OpenSSH, let alone lecture people about it.
Let them call their fork DebSSH, like they have to do with "IceWeasel" and all the other nonsense they mire themselves into.
When you break software to the point you change how it behaves you shouldn't be allowed to use the same name.
So when you do update and get that GSSAPI change, it comes with two years worth of other updates - and tracking that down mixed in with everything else is going to be all kinds of fun.
And if you're two years out of the loop and it turns out upstream broke something fundamental, and you're just now finding out about it while they've moved on and maybe continued with a redesign, that's also going to be a fun conversation.
So if the backport model is expensive and error prone, and it exists to support something that maybe wasn't such a good idea in the first place... well, you may want something, but that doesn't make it smart.
One is security updates and bug fixes. These need to fix the problem with the smallest change to minimize the amount of possible breakage, because the code is already vulnerable/broken in production and needs to be updated right now. These are the updates stable gets.
The other is changes and additions. They're both more likely to break things and less important to move into production the same day they become public.
You don't have to wait until testing is released as stable to run it in your test environment. You can find out about the changes the next release will have immediately, in the test environment, and thereby have plenty of time to address any issues before those changes move into production.
If you want the rolling release like distro, just run debian unstable. That's what you get. It's on par with all the other constantly updated distros out there. Or just run one of those.
Also, Debian stable has a lifetime a lot longer than 2 years, see https://www.debian.org/releases/. Some of us need distros like stable, because we are in giant orgs that are overworked and have long release cycles. Our users want stuff to "just work" and stable promises if X worked at release, it will keep working until we stop support. You don't add new features to a stable release.
From a personal perspective: Debian Stable is for your grandparents or young children. You install Stable, turn on auto-update and every 5-ish years you spend a day upgrading them to the next stable release. Then you spend a week or two helping them through all the new changes and then you have minimal support calls from them for 5-ish years. If you handed them a rolling release or Debian unstable, you'd have constant support calls.
Some people will even run Debian on the desktop. I would never, but some people get real upset when anything changes.
Debian does regularly bring newer versions of software: they release about every two years. If you want the latest and greatest Debian experience, upgrade Debian on week one.
From your description, you seem to want Arch but made by Debian?
Isn't that essentially Debian unstable (with potentially experimental enabled)? I've been running Debian unstable on my desktops for something like 20 years.
But that does nothing for people who write and support code Debian wants to ship - packaging code badly can create a real mess for upstream.
FWIW the fixes referenced here are already fixed in trixie: https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/source-package/d...
I never understood why some projects get extremely popular and others don't. I also suspect by now that the reports by tools that are "too dangerous to release" scan all projects but selectively only contact those with issues, so that they never have to admit that their tool didn't find anything.
What else can they do, assuming the computers behind the router are all patched up.
It's definitely bad.
Welcome to the new world order.
why can't machine-learning write a product from scratch that is flawless?
Flawless software is hard for an LLM to write, because all the programs they have been trained on are flawed as well.
As a fun exercise, you could give a coding agent a hunk of non-trivial software (such as the Linux kernel, or postgresql, or whatever), and tell it over and over again: find a flaw in this, fix it. I'm pretty sure it won't ever tell you "now it's perfect" (and do this reproducibly).
Whatever the answer to that conundrum might be, LLMs are trained on these patterns and replicate them pretty faithfully.
My own MaraDNS has been extensively audited now that we’re in the age of AI-assisted security audits.
Not one single serious security bug has been found since 2023. [1]
The only bugs auditers have been finding are things like “Deadwood, when fully recursive, will take longer than usual to release resources when getting this unusual packet” [2] or “This side utility included with MaraDNS, which hasn’t been able to be compiled since 2022, has a buffer overflow, but only if one’s $HOME is over 50 characters in length” [3]
I’m actually really pleased just how secure MaraDNS is now that it’s getting real in depth security audits.
[1] https://samboy.github.io/MaraDNS/webpage/security.html
[2] https://github.com/samboy/MaraDNS/discussions/136
[3] https://github.com/samboy/MaraDNS/pull/137
dnsmasq has served me well for like an eternity in multiple setups for different use cases. As all software it has bugs. And once located those get fixed. Its author is also easy to communicate with.
Why should I switch over to something way less proven? I'm quite sure your software also has bugs, many still not located. Maybe because it's less popular/ less well known nobody cares to hunt for those bugs? Which means even if the numbers of found bugs is less in your software at the moment, and it may look more audited for this reason, it may actually be way less secure.