Miles Bader wrote:
But the sentence "Testing is intended for Debian developers. If you are not a Debian developer, then install unstable as opposed to testing" is nonsensical; just get rid of it. -miles
This has been corrected now. The corresponding question and answer are given below so that the experts can offer their opinion. Your comments are most welcome.
10. OK! so far so good. Could you tell me whether to install testing or unstable?
This is a rather subjective issue. There is no perfect answer but only a "wise guess" could be made while deciding between unstable and testing. My personal order of preference is Stable, Unstable and Testing. The issue is like this:
Stable is rock solid. It does not break.Testing breaks less often than Unstable. But when it breaks, it takes a long time for things to get rectified. Sometimes this could be days and it could be months at times. But in unstable things get rectified within couple of days.
But there are times when tracking testing would be beneficial as opposed to unstable. One such situation occurred to me due to the gcc transition from gcc3 to gcc4. I was trying to install labplot package on a machine tracking unstable and it could not be installed in unstable as some of its dependencies have undergone gcc4 transition and some have not. But the package in testing is installable on a testing machine as the gcc4 transitioned packages have not "trickled down" to testing.