Well, that is puzzling, because people are talking about upgrading to the latest Fedora, in preference to Debian. But I understand Fedora uses the latest versions of apps? This would seem to make it equivalent to Debian unstable (and just as unsuitable for production servers). I've never actually run Fedora though (and I haven't run Redhat for years), so perhaps there's some flexibility I don't know about.
Red Hat still run a tree called "Rawhide", which is "whatever we're up to at the moment". That is analagous to Debian Unstable. With both distributions, every now and then, the tree is stablised, tested and released. The difference is that for Fedora Core it's every 6 months, and for Debian is it every few years. The problem that is being pointed out is that people want to run newer things than from when Woody (the current stbale Debian release) was released. If Perry wants to install his RDF library, he eithers gets the feature set from 3 years ago with security fixes, or in the case that the package is new, it simply does not exist in stable. The other option is backports of testing/unstable software to Woody, and we all have horror stories we can tell you about that. This is, of course, if you want to deal with only the software that is packaged by your distribution. I saw someone a couple of days ago announce that a backport of Gnome 2.2 was now available for Woody. Just after the release of Gnome 2.6. People who package software aren't targeting Debian any more, and it's arguable that Debian's relevance is only decreasing. Maybe if someone made New Whizz-Bang Up To Date Thing with a woody target, we'd be ok; however free software builds on other free software, and whizz-bang things tend to rely on newer versions of software than what woody provides. The latest version of apps isn't a bad thing; things move on, features get added. (Obligatory "My Servers Run Woody" disclaimer) Craig