Re: What are your best practices for running Debian unstable?
2011/3/13 Andrei Popescu <andreimpopescu@gmail.com>:
> On Sb, 12 mar 11, 19:07:50, darkestkhan wrote:
>>
>> I'm running sid / experimental so dist-upgrade in my case is almost
>> like throwing away half of the system; And I'm using aptitude
>> safe-upgrade which is good solution. Also frequent ( I'm doing upgrade
>> at least 2 times a day ) upgrades are really sorting out most of
>> inter-release changes that may ( or may not ) happen in Sid.
>
> That's not my experience, left undone some full-upgrades just tend to
> accumulate more packages to be removed. Especially library packages are
> "removed". Example:
>
>
> Package foo version 1.2 depends on a library with package name
> libbar1.2. Now foo version 1.3 is uploaded, which depends on a library
> with name libbar1.3, but for some reason libbar1.3 conflicts with
> libbar1.2. apt will not be able to upgrade foo unless you allow it to
> remove libbar1.2, which is normal and what you would want.
>
In which case I'm manually intervening, though aptitude is solving
this problem in most cases for me really gracefully. Running apt-get
dist-upgrade would cause removal of ~2GB ( latex, fonts, and few other
) of packages just to get slightly newer library, which breaks those
packages.
>
> Unfortunately there are also cases when a dist/full-upgrade will do the
> wrong thing. Distinguishing between the two cases needs experience (but
> aptitude's interactive resolver is of great help).
>
>> Also
>> packages in Sid or experimental can have unsatisfied dependencies.
>
> You might want to add testing to your sources.list, because it can
> happen that a package is removed from unstable to unblock a complex
> transition to testing.
Maybe, but in this case I would:
a) install/upgrade it before it disappear from sid
b) even if package disappeared it is still installed on my system
c) quite often they are staying in experimental ( or at least that is
my experience )
And most dangerous transitions are occurring in experimental
darkestkhan
------------------------------------------
jid: darkestkhan@gmail.com
May The Source be with You.
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