Wolf Halton's Opensource & Security

After a long testing phase, Debian 7 is ready for prime time.

I have been running Debian 7 on development machines and testing VMs for months, and also running squeeze-backports on production machines for about a year and a half.  Backports brings future packets, that are working on the testing version of Wheezy, but cannot be added to the stable Squeeze release.  Debian Stable is really stable, and essentially all the packages are at a version that was tested in the testing phase for over a year.  This means that the Stable Version always uses packages that are well away from the leading edge.  On servers, the important factors are stability and no semi-yearly version upgrades.  Ubuntu has a history of twice-a-year upgrades, based on the Debian Testing branch.  This makes Ubuntu a newer version of almost everything and every package, but newer doesn’t mean safer or better in the software world.  Most systems admins will not even start considering upgrading their Squeeze servers to Wheezy  until Wheezy’s first bug-fix point release.  It is safe, in my opinion, to provision new servers with Wheezy unless you are running custom packages that are not ready for Wheezy yet.