Nick Jennings wrote:
This brings up a question I have. Isn't testing technically the *last*of stable/testing/unstable to get security fixes?
Correct.
security fixes for stable are packported immediately, and the fixes are also incorporated into unstable asap. Now for testing, there would be at least a delay of a week for it to pass through unstable correct?This is annoying, because testing is acutally in most cases in a pretty stable state, and would be good for many production environmentsexcept for the fact that security fixes take the longest to get incorporated. Can anyone verify this?
This is one of the reasons why I use APT's pinning and default release feature. With testing *and* unstable entries in /etc/apt/sources.list plus the line 'APT::Default-Release "testing";' in /etc/apt/apt.conf, 'apt-get [install|upgrade|dist-upgrade]' defaults to retrieving testing packages. 'apt-get install foo -t unstable' will install package foo and all of its dependencies from sid onto an otherwise woody installation. From then on, apt retrieves updates of foo and its dependencies from unstable until the version installed moves over to testing. Very nice and handy for the bug fixes you just don't want to wait for.