Making snapshot of woody/sid.

[Sampo Niskanen <sampo.niskanen@iki.fi>]

Hi,

I'd like to upgrade to woody/sid to get some of the neat new software
around, but the problem is I don't happen to have a big fat pipe coming to
my computer. Therefore I'd like to make a snapshot of woody or sid onto
CDs, and was wondering what's the best way to do that.

The pseudo-image kit seems to be able to make images of only the stable
distribution, so it can't be used. I also only want the i386 version, so a
plain "wget -r -l0" won't do the trick either. Could you suggest a way to
retrieve the main, contrib, non-free and non-US packages for the i386?

I have made a program to split large directory structures into pieces (and
I have enough space to reconstruct the directory structure at home), so
fetching only the neccessary directory structure would be sufficient.

The machine on which I'd be burning the CDs is a non-debian Linux
(Slackware, to be exact), so I'd rather the fetching be
non-debian-specific. Also, there is a a Debian mirror site next door to
the machine, so fetching large amounts of data is not a problem and
shouldn't bother too many people.


As a side question, how stable is "unstable" actually? I'm used to getting
the latest versions of all software, so I'm also used to having some
applications crash now and then, but will something really _break_ if I
start using "unstable"?  (I also know how to use a boot disk and fix a
machine if neccessary.)


Thanks for all your help.

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