On Fri, 25 Feb 2005 10:39:25 +0100, <goran.krampe at bluefish.se> wrote:

> "Rougly" yes, but... if this leads to a single "part" (the whole Basic
> image) then there is no point, is there? :)

Well, yes there is. Because maybe if you're going to deploy them all at  
once, it's still good to partition it.

Let's (yawn) look at Debian again. There is a distinct kernel of packages  
in Debian that all must be loaded together - there's a bootstrap script to  
do that so you can build a new system on a mounted disk from scratch.  
These packages are heavily intertwined and interdependent. Nothing's gonna  
tick without the C run-time-library, for starters.

So releasing them separately is nonsense.

However, the unstable/testing/stable separations lets developers put their  
own new versions of their own kernel packages into unstable, play and  
experiment, quite independently. Sure, things will be messed up at times,  
but that's why it's called unstable, remember? Then, when some new  
constellation works, these package versions are most likely to be moved as  
a whole 'configuration map' into testing, which gets a new core. Bang!.  
When these versions have proven themselves as being cooperable with all  
the other stuff, it's time to announce stable old, testing stable, and  
open a new testing area. At least, that's how I understood it ;).

So being able to maintain them independently is not nonsensical at all.