Getting ready

At any point in time, Debian has three different branches available for use: stable, testing, and unstable. Think of unstable as the cutting edge of free software; it has reasonably modern software packages, and sometimes those packages introduce changes or features that may break the user experience. After an amount of time has passed (usually 10 days, but it depends on the package's upload priority), the new software is considered to be relatively safe to use and is moved to testing. Testing can provide a good balance between modern software and relatively reliable software. Testing goes through several iterations during the course of several years, and eventually it's frozen for a new stable release. This stable release is supported by the Debian Project for a number of years, including feature and security updates.

Chances are you are building something that has an interesting team of people to back it up. In such scenarios, web development teams have chosen to go with testing, or even unstable, in order to get the latest software available. In other cases, conservative teams or groups with less savvy staff have resorted to stable because it's consistent for years.

It is up to you to choose between any, but this book will get you started with stable. You can change your Advanced Packaging Tool (APT) configuration later and upgrade to testing and unstable, but the initial installation media that we will use will be stable. Also, it is important that developers target the production environment as closely as possible. If you use stable for production, using stable for development will save a lot of time debugging mismatches.

You should know which versions of programming languages, modules, libraries, frameworks, and databases your application will be targeting, as this will influence the selection of your branch. You can go to packages.debian.org to check the versions available for a specific package across different branches. Choosing testing (outside a freeze period) and unstable will also mean that you'll need to have an upgrade strategy where you continuously check for new updates (with tools such as cron-apt) and install them if you want to take advantage of new bug fixes and so on.