[linux-audio-dev] Poll: Distro for audio and MIDI development

[Maarten De Boer]

This is a nice coincidence, because I just installed Debian Sid
('unstable') on my home workstation.

I am also a convinced Debian user, and all the servers and workstations
I administrate are Debian Woody ('stable'). Now, recently, I have seen
myself forced to install more and more backported packages, and backporting
some  myself, because Debian stable is rather conservative, and this can be
a problem if you have new hardware, esp. video cards, or if you need to run
recent  versions of applications, are depend on recent versions of
libraries...

Personally, I think the release cycle of Debian should be a lot shorter,
and I think a lot of people agree with that. On the other hand, on the
web/mail/file/cvs servers I run, I really want stable. The good thing is,
you get the choice, and I think Debian is the only distro with such a
choice. A lot of distro's present unstable and untested things as
stable. For me the clearest example, and actually the reason I switched to
Debian, was RedHat's broken GCC (2.96 I think), which I guess was just
included to pretend to be "cutting edge". Now, I recently installed a
RedHat 9, and with PlanetCCRMA on top, it is very nice, but running Debian
Sid does not feel less safe to me. And I would never run any mission-
critical servers with RedHat. Here Debian stable is the safest bet.

Anyway, I expect that I might switch to unstable, or at least testing, for
some of the workstations, when I feel that modifying stable becomes more work
and also more risky, than simply using unstable.

Maarten