Recently I learned (as a long time Ubuntu user, not that much into Debian) that there are three flavours of debian: the current stable (Wheezy, old software, but stable), the bleeding edge (newest but possibly unstable, Sid), and an in-between 'next stable version' (Jessie).

Because my raspberry is at the heart of my coffee machine since somewhere around december and I like to be quite sure of being able to drink coffee. On my laptop I use Ubuntu - if it where Debian I'd probably be using Jessie. The machine can play music using MPD, it has python and does serve some web pages, but my first priority is stability. So, the obvious choice for me is Wheezy. At least that's what I think.

However, since I'm using this setup, it happened twice that after a regular apt-get update, I was unable to make coffee for some time. First time because a newly added obscure i2c audio card driver was causing kernel panics, second time because this Device Tree thing.

While I fully understand both the architectural beauty and the benefits of this change, I think that I'm not the only one with stability as my main concern. My wife already thinks that 'update' means 'trouble', while it should mean 'bug fixing and better security' in a stable release. Wouldn't it be better if this change, and similar changes in the future, be made in Jessie/Sid and not in Wheezy?

And another question: can the serial (RxD/TxD/ttyAM0) be added to the DT model? On my rpi the coffee grinder is connected to GPIO 14 that happens to be the TxD line, so in the beginning it grinded coffee to the kernel logs... ;-) I think I have now disabled the latest ttyAM0 outputter, but it feels like this would also be a good thing to explicitly enable using a DT parameter.