Comment by PunchyHamster

> That whole model dates to before automated testing was even really a thing, and no one knew how to do QA; your QA was all the people willing to run your code and report bugs, and that took time. Not to mention, you think the C of today is bad? Have you looked at old C

The automatically tested Debian release is called Debian Testing. And it is stable enough.

Debian Stable is basically "we target particular release with our dependencies instead of requiring customer to update entire system together with our software". That model works just fine as long as you don't go too far back.

> On top of that, the backport model heavily discourages the kinds of refactorings and architectural cleanups that would address bugs systemically and encourage a whack-a-mole approach - because in the backport model, people want fixes they can backport. And then things just get worse and worse.

Narrator: It turned out things were not getting worse, they were just fine.

> We'd all be a lot better off if certain projects took some of the enthusiasm with which they throw outrageous engineering time at backports, and spent at least some of that on automated testing and converting to Rust.

That project is RedHat, not Debian, they backport entire features back to old versions (together with bugs!)