Re: Upgrading to Testing (was: Re: Ive been getting scanned...)
Marc Shapiro <m_shapiro@bigfoot.com> wrote:
>What are the proper lines to put in /etc/apt/sources.list to upgrade
>from stable to testing? I seem to recal someone on the list saying to
>replace the lines for stable with:
>
>deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian testing main contrib non-free
>deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free
>
>but this will also get packages from unstable, which I would prefer not
>to do at this time. If I do make these changes and do an 'apt-get
>update/upgrade' then apt wants to upgrade 188 packages on my box, add 40
>some packages and delete 11 packages. If I only have the line for
>testing in my sources.list then 'upgrade' only wants to change 7
>packages and 'dist-upgrade' also updates only 7 packages and wants to
>delete 3 others. There is much that simply does not exist in testing
>that is in stable and unstable. I thought that testing was a complete
>set of packages, but this does not seem to be the case. Can anyone
>explain exactly the way packages flow through the system, including when
>a new release becomes stable?
Somebody's replied already to say that testing was broken yesterday;
normally you'd see a lot more change than that. Discounting that ...
'testing' is a fairly new invention to try to help speed up release
cycles. The idea, roughly, is that it's normally not too far behind
unstable but doesn't suffer from some of the worse problems in unstable.
Developers upload new versions of packages to unstable, and, after a
period of time there, individual versions of packages migrate into
testing according to various rules: they can't have any high-severity
bugs filed against them, and putting them into testing can't make more
packages uninstallable than was already the case.
testing started off as a copy of stable, but at various times I think
things have got out of kilter in such a way as to leave certain packages
in stable and unstable but not testing (but I may be misremembering
there). That should mostly get fixed before release.
Sooner or later, after testing has been largely frozen for a while so
that we can, er, test it, the release manager decides that today is a
good day to release. At that point, testing becomes stable, a new
testing branch is created, and we go round again. Since woody will be
our first release with testing, I'm not sure if anybody knows yet quite
how it'll go.
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjw44@flatline.org.uk]
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