On Fri, Jan 19, 2001 at 08:50:14AM -0800, Bill Wohler wrote: > If the stability of stable is 10 and the stability of unstable is 1, > how would you rate the testing distribution? (This might be a useful > metric to post on the Debian site to help Debian users decide which > distribution is for them.) This is all my opinion, of course ... First, Debian unstable is about 6 or 7 if everyone else's unstable is 1 :) I run unstable on my desktop and as long as I don't blindly upgrade "just because", all is well. This is an argument for apt-get vs. dselect; see below. To answer your quesion directly, I'd say testing is about 7 or 8 given your constraints. I don't agree that such a metric should be posted anywhere official; it's 100% subjective opinion. What's stable for me may be hell for you. > Also, it would be nice to just update /etc/apt/sources.list and fire > off dselect to go from potato to woody, but I suppose folks here > will recommend that I use "apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade" > instead. You can do this if you like dselect. I don't recommend it though since it's easy to get in a situation where dselect decides to do something you don't want to do, and unless you remember to type "Q" dselect remembers it's choices! apt-get get is stateless; if it tells you it wants to remove 45 packages and you say "N", apt-get will not try to remove those packages next time (at least, not due to some cached state; if you provide the same information it will reach the same conclusion of course) Finally, I find apt-get more useful after adding the this to /etc/apt/apt/conf: Apt::Get::Show-Upgraded "true"; This will show the names of all packages which apt wants to upgrade; usually it merely says "192 packages upgraded" :) HTH, -- Nathan Norman - Staff Engineer | A good plan today is better Micromuse Inc. | than a perfect plan tomorrow. mailto:nnorman@micromuse.com | -- Patton
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