Re: Dangers in "upgrading" to unstable?
To quote "Colin Cashman" <ccashman@mediaone.net>,
# I recently installed Debian on my laptop, but some of the programs I
was planning on using exist only in unstable (for instance,
# Enlightenment 0.16.5).
If you only want a limited number of newer packages(I'd say less than 20
or 30), you can do the following to get the newer package for your
Potato system:
1) Temporarily add a deb-src line in your sources.list pointing to
unstable.
2) 'apt-get source <package>'
3) Go into the newly created directory, and run, as root,
'dpkg-buildpackage -uc -b'
4) In the directory above the newly created directory(probably where you
ran 'apt-get source <package>', you'll have new binary .deb(s), made for
Potato.
5) Comment out your unstable deb-src line in sources.list.
6) Lather, rinse, repeat :)
# What are the dangers in upgrading my system to run unstable? What
issues am I likely to face if I do upgrade the whole thing to
# unstable? Would it simply be better to download the specific unstable
packages I want and otherwise stick with simply running
# stable?
Now, I've been running Sid for a while now(I was using Woody before
that). I can say that my system is really quite stable. Very few things
segfault on me, everything compiles well, it's really quite a pleasure
:)
However, sometimes the upgrade itself causes problems. For instance, I
see a lot of people coming in to #debian on irc.openprojects.net with
perl installation problems - only when they're upgrade to Woody/Sid,
though. I didn't get that problem, so I don't know the solution, but
it's a good example.
Also, you should be familiar with system recovery. You should have a
rescue disk, with anything you might need to get your system up and
running. For example, a broken LILO package made it into Sid a while
back, and over-wrote some people's lilo.conf, without a backup. Some
people's systems were even unbootable after that. Not a good thing :)
And, lastly, if you're using Sid(unstable), you'll likely not get any
sympathy if a new package breaks stuff. You're using "unstable" Debian,
after all :) Expect hiccups and maybe even worse.
David Barclay Harris, Clan Barclay
Aut agere, aut mori. (Either action, or death.)
Reply to: