Dean Hamstead wrote:
i would just upgrade your whole system to unstable its not actually unstable, just not ridiculously conservatively stable
I still think we need to find better names for them. "stable" sounds like "is not crashing", which means "unstable" sounds like "is crashing". I think what they MEANS is that "stable" is a non-moving target, while "unstable" is very much alive.
if i was running a server i would stick with stable, but for desktops (i dont see why amsn would be running on a server) i would go unstable all the way.
Well, I would modify that statement _slightly_. When you get comfortable with APT and understand how to roll back if some package in unstable suddenly doesn't work (I remember binutils stopped working one time last year, it's very nice to have yesterdays version in /var/cache/apt/archives/ then ;-) ), THEN you should upgrade to sid.
Everything I _use_ is running sid. The only machines running something else are two PRePs, one with Woody and one with Sarge, and those are only kept around because I used to backport packages from sid and distribute to AmigaOne owners running Woody/Sarge. (eg there was that freeciv competition around christmas which required freeciv 1.4.something :-) )
Also, one should always look into pinning APT via /etc/apt/preferences. I use this a lot to force in my own packages. At the moment I'm running samba 3.0.2a on sid even though 3.0.5 has been released, simply because I can't get the newer smbfs to work with our Win2k server, and I didn't have time to find out why. I _had_ time to copy the files to a web server and run dpkg-scanpackages, though :-)
sid isn't a distribution, it's a life-style :-P And it suits me juuuust fine. Ole-Egil