Am Mittwoch, 14. September 2005 08.10 schrieb Christof Hurschler: > Thanks, > > I guess I'd like to know more concreteley what types of problems could > occur. Will apt install libraries on an otherwise Sarge system, during a > KDE upgrade for instance, that could break the system? The first and most obvious problem will simply be dependency conflicts. Some package depends on a central library whose version is only available in SID. If that library is not compatible with the apps in Sarge which depend on the older version, you will have to use the SID Version of all these application, which tends to pull in more and more libraries which then aggravate the problem instead of actually solving it. The main problem with that is that the system tends towards SID, i.e. in the long run it will have more and more SID packages installed, which usually isn't the point of running Sarge with SID "addons" in the first place. The next "stage" of this problem is, when the dependencies don't catch the problem, because of differences in Sarge/SID, and you end up with incompatible libraries installed, which then usually causes random programs not to work, which cannot be the point of actually running "stable"... When Woody really started to "grow old" we found on www.debianforum.de that more and more people started to "mix and match" and ran Woody+Sarge. We actually partially encouraged people to do so, if they needed more up-to-date software. But as it turned out after some time we found that about 30-40% of all new threads in the forum revolved around problems which directly resulted from the Woody+Sarge mix. usually doing a little cleanup and lifting the system completely to sarge (which was in testing at that time) solved the problems... In my opinion, if you really need more up-to-date software, either run sarge+backports (and choose those backports wisely, as diferent backports can conflict with each other) or directly run Etch (Security Support for Etch/testing has just been announced...) > I have a partition image of my system at Sarge state, so that I can go back > in a matter of minutes if things get screwed up. Which *always* is a sane thing to have... Patrick -- Patrick Dreker GPG KeyID : 0xFCC2F7A7 (Patrick Dreker) Fingerprint: 7A21 FC7F 707A C498 F370 1008 7044 66DA FCC2 F7A7 Key available from keyservers
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