Thomas Walter wrote:
Can you give me some lite why installing backports shall make the system unstable? These backports often close bugs.
Quick examples: Sometime between linux kernel 2.6.8 and 2.6.12, ide-tape support was broken, at least for my hardware. It just panics. AFAIK, it's still broken in the newest release. Yeah, I filed a bug report.... many moons ago (and, depending on what you call large Kuiper belt objects, planets ago).
On another machine, either 2.6.13 or 2.6.14 made it so that use of the network and the hard disks are mutually exclusive; bug filed long ago, still broken in the newest kernels :-( Of course, 2.6.12 is broken too; timekeeping does not work (dual-core AMD64).
Xorg 6.9 broke ATI hardware nearly completely (numerous bugs filed by other people). Xorg 7.0 half-fixes it (one bug by me so far, other bugs by other people). Xorg 6.8 (and XFree86) worked fine.
With old software, we have a known set of bugs — but since we know the bugs, we can often work around them. With new software, we have a (hopefully smaller) unknown new set of bugs.
Stable has known bugs. Unstable, testing, and backports.org have unknown bugs. Chose your poison.
[Of course, sometimes upstream makes backwards-incompatible changes, in which case you may have to re-write your config files after installing a backport. Sometimes, they remove features you like, particularly if upstream rather cryptically calls themselves "GNU's Not Unix Network Object Model Environment"]