Re: possible move to unstable..
To quote Marcial Zamora III <chic0@msdelta.com>,
# hey all.. I know this mite stir up a great deal of debate, but its not
my intention.. Im currently running potato, and thinking bout running
unstable.. there are quite a few packages I would like to have in
unstable, and I know ahead of time, to successfully install those
packages, there are others in the same directory tree that I would
need.. from wut I have seen in the entries in the mailing list so far,
unstable is not really that *unstable*. The only real concern I think I
would have is the move from Xfree86 3.3.6 to 4.0.2.. any of you guys
have any input on this ? or any recommendations as to wut to do ahead of
time, before I decided to go with a dist-upgrade ? to all who respond, I
thank you in advance =)
Well, there are a few things you can do;
a) Add a deb-src entry in sources.list pointing to unstable, then
'apt-get source <package that you want>', then go into the newly created
directory and(as root) 'dpkg-buildpackage -uc -b'. That'll give you a
nice binary .deb built for your platform. This isn't guaranteed to
work(since you're compiling a Sid package on a Potato machine), but it's
always worked for me.
b) Upgrade to Sid(unstable). It runs fine on my machine, but there are
two things you should worry about: the upgrading process itself seems to
be touchy - so you might run into trouble there. If you jump that hurdle
though, you're probably set. The second thing is that you should be
familiar with system recovery. For instance, a new LILO package was
uploaded to Sid recently, and it made more than one machine unbootable.
So, you should be able to restore things on your own. Also keep backups.
:) Also, if something breaks, people are much less likely to sympathize
with you, since you're running Sid(unstable), and you should know better
;)
c) Upgrade to Woody(testing). Woody is the new "in-between"
distribution, which is supposed to be more stable then Sid. For
instance, the broken LILO package never made it into Woody. This is what
I suggest to most people who ask about the different versions.
Woody/testing is a nice compromise - you get relatively up-to-date
packages, and your system isn't nearly as likely to die because of it.
Currently, Woody is using XFree86 3.3.6, so if you upgrade to Woody, you
won't need to worry about 4.0.2 yet. Hopefully, by the time 4.0.2 gets
into Woody, a nicer setup program will exist(since the 3.3.6 and 4.0.2
config files are vastly different). Right now, there's 'xf86config',
which is an admirable stop-gap measure, but it's not right for at least
60% or the users out there.
David Barclay Harris, Clan Barclay
Aut agere, aut mori. (Either action, or death.)
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