It's Called Sid

I've been using Debian sid, or unstable, on my desktop systems for a long time, at least 12 years. Despite the "unstable" moniker, it is quite usable. However, Debian 5.0, AKA stable, AKA lenny, was released a few weeks ago. Experience has taught me that for a month or two after the release, sid sometimes becomes a little, um, unstable.

Tonight, when I tried to watch an anime, I get no sound. No, actually, I can hear something but it is very faint and distant. After a minute or two, I realized the sound has somehow been diverted to the internal speaker! After trying to figure out what went wrong for almost half an hour, I decided to just blacklist the snd_pcsp module and reboot. It's an ugly hack but it worked. I just want to watch the anime, dammit!

Thankfully this is just small problem, but unstable has lived up to its name. I still remember when the bash package broke, leaving the system without a working shell. That was fun! As a result, the bash package is now the only one that is allowed to have binaries for the package management scripts. This happened more than 10 years ago and was the worst breakage I've experienced in sid. It depends on what you run on the system too. For people who run complex desktops like Gnome or KDE, it can get really nasty.

Why does this happen after a release? While preparing for the release, all of Debian is frozen and only packages with critical bug fixes may enter sid. This state can last a long time so all the newest versions of packages go to the experimental distribution. Very few people use experimental, so the packages do not get much testing. After the release, these packages are allowed to enter sid, and the fun begins!