How unstable is Potato?

["John Gay" <John_Gay@eur.3com.com>]

Judging from the Debian weekly news recently posted, the main stopping point for
freezing Potato is the boot floppies. I'm running a Slink system because I am
very new to Linux and UNIX. The only deviation from Slink is I installed an
updated Xserver for my ATI AGP Rage+ video card. I have been compiling new
kernels to try to get USB working for a few projects, but other than that, I'm
very nervous of upgrading. I recently got a new scanner, because I couldn't get
the USB one working, but I can't compile xsane or xscanimage because I need gtk+
1.2, which, although gtk does have slink .debs for it, it also requires xlib6g
>=3.3.4. This, in turn relies on libc6 >=1.2. Both of these requires Potato. If
the boot floppies are the main problem with potato, I'd upgrade because I've
already got a working system. But if upgrading is going to break lots of stuff,
I guess I'll wait till the next millennium. I did have a very bad experience
when I did upgrade libc6 to 1.2 a while ago, then tried to install StarOffice.
StarOffice insisted on updating some libraries and rendered my system completely
broken! Even the help of Linux experts couldn't recommend anything but a
complete install. This was back in June, and I think I remember something about
Potato being in very bad shape at that moment. I now have StarOffice rpm's on a
CD-ROM I got on a magazine cover, but I haven't installed it yet.

So, My main question is, other than the boot floppies, is Potato fairly safe and
stable for a relative newbie? My system doesn't have apt installed, but I should
be able to use dselect to upgrade. Would it be easier to use dselect to install
apt via ftp and then use apt to update the rest of my system?

Thanks again for all the help and for a very tidy and easy to update Linux
system.

Cheers,

     John Gay