[arch] arch-stable

[Erwin Van de Velde]

Hi,

I think that Arch will never be the best server distribution:
e.g. Moving from PHP 4.x to 5.0 without leaving the older version in the 
packages surely resulted in problems for a couple of web-based tools. Having 
a new kernel on an almost weekly basis is not going to help either. In my 
opinion Arch is meant to be easy, fast and near the edge between development 
and stable versions, which is why I like it on my laptop. 
For servers however, a little more stability is likely to be appreciated and 
so on the servers of our research group, I installed FreeBSD, which combines 
in my opinion stability and new features in a very good way, even though I am 
not eager to install it on my laptop due to the compilation times of the 
ports you install (it is almost like a source based distribution if you 
update regularly).

Most of the time I am not a huge fan of all the different Linux and BSD 
distributions which differ in some details (e.g. think of all the 
Ubuntu-based distributions), but I think that there is a clear gap between a 
server distribution and one for personal use, a gap that cannot be closed 
just by keeping some older versions in some type of a stable repository. One 
of the most difficult things will be that you will get a huge amount of 
packages or that the user will have to start compiling everything anyway 
(version differences with libraries etc.: apache x.y compiled against lib*** 
z.u, apache x.y compiled against lib*** z'.u', ...). It does not seem like 
fun to be creating binaries for all those combinations and who will decide 
what is stable enough when?

This is of course just my 2 cents :-)

Greetings,
Erwin