Re: Shall I upgrade to Woody?
> I know this is a bit to generic question, and it has been probably already
> discussed a 1000 times,
Actually I believe it was discussed less then you imagine.
> but I'm fairly new, so please forgive me if I ask it nevertheless.
>
It seems to me that this should be the major factor by which you should
decide.
Are you fairly new to Linux in general?
> Is there a big risk in upgrading to Woody now?
I believe a risk is a relative in nature and depends on many factors:
Is this a production machine? Are you willing to face a possible
reinstall from scratch? How experienced are you? Have you got any means
to surf the Internet in order to post and read the Debian lists if
there will be a problem? Are you willing to wait a few days until a
possible problem is resolved and you get to know the solution?
> What speaks agains it?
There are few glitches from time to time. Not many and some of them are
much less severe then others, but there are. The need to put more time
in your system.
> What is the main advantage in doing so?
Having more recent versions of packages, much easier to grab only few
packages from unstable in case that is what you need, constant updating
your system in a rather safe from bugs manner, help in debugging Debian
and free software, getting more experience with the system.
>
> Also to give a little more background to the question:
> I yesterday foolishly tried to experiment with adding some unoffical sources
> to the apt sources.list.
> Basically I wanted to get a recent Mozilla already packaged as deb.
>
> I somehow didn't payed attenion while selecting, or else dselect
> automatically has found and selected
> severel nver versions of some basic packages, without me noticing, because
> it installed several new
> gnome packages etc.
> Also suddenly some of the packages which were installed (e.g XMMS) claim to
> be missing some
> dependencies, which I can't find in the package list anywhere etc.
> (Allthough it works - at least for mp3s)
> I've also had trouble installing mozilla from tarballs. It was missing
> libstdc++libc6.1-1.so.2 etc.
>
> So the thought occured to me, that I could do an upgrade to Woody and get
> the latest from everything...
>
> Some related problems:
> 1. Just checking. If I would want to upgrade to Woody, I'd need to add
> 'testing' or 'woody' to the sources.list,
> and then I'd need to issue 'apt-get dist-upgrade'?
>
Not sure if testing will work although I believe it will. So the answer
is yes.
> 2. Is it possible to somehow delete the package database, and make apt
> reread the official ones from debian.org?
>
Probably yes, but `somehow' sounds to me more trickier then you imagine.
> 3. Is it possible to go back to the state in dselect before you started
> making selections?
> I know that i theory 'R' should go back to the state before the current
> selection, but sometimes it
> seems to get stuck in a loop and alway brings me back the same dependency
> screen.
> Also if I made several selections, but then change my mind and want to go
> back to the state where it was
> when I've started dselect, is this possible?
>
I do not have that much experience with dselect but I believe that it
is not hard to get back if nothing was actually installed. That is,
aborting before any package was actually installed should not be too
hard.
> Many,many thanks for your help in advance!
> best regards,
> Balazs
>
>
>
>
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--
When responding, please qoute my entire message.
Shaul Karl <shaulka@bezeqint.net>
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