[sf-lug] point releases & ISOs: (was: Ubuntu, GPartEd, Bad Luck with Blue Collar Linux-Help! etc.)

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Michael Paoli (Michael.Paoli at cal.berkeley.edu):

> The only particular advantage of using a more current point release ISO,
> is there's less to update after that - which can - at that time - save
> time/bandwidth.  That's it.  No other advantages.

But _even at that_, that amounts to essentially no difference.  If you
start with an Official Debian 9.0 ISO that furnishes Firefox 65.0.1-1
and then your first apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade pulls down a
newly minted Firefox 65.0.1-8 package, you might imagine 'Ah, if I'd
only used an Official Debian 9.7 ISO, I'd not have needed that -- but,
probably not.  Likely as not, the ISO would have furnished, say, package
version 65.0.1-7, and you would _still_ have fetched 65.0.1-8 from the
apt repositories.  Thus, essentially no difference -- unless you mean 
'for the first week following a point release becoming available, there
will not yet have been package updates against it.'  Which is true, but
then you're in Week Two and you converge onto normal reality.

The point being that any installer image immediately needs package
updates to track the repo collections (except for a very short time),
and the difference in that regard between point releases is tiny, and
also negligible compared to the ongoing slow rain of package updates
during package resyncs thereafter.

(Above version numbers are pulled from the air as I've not taken the
time to see what is furnished in specific point releases, but would
suggest it's representative of the general situation one observes in
using the distribution and its various installer images.  OTOH, it's
true that Firefox 65.0.1 is the version packaged in Debian 9 'Squeeze.)