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Re: woody and sid



on Sat, Nov 17, 2001 at 07:05:50AM -0800, David Roundy (droundy@civet.berkeley.edu) wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 17, 2001 at 06:24:56AM +0000, ben wrote:
> > how does one go about upgrading to woody or sid and what are the pros and 
> > cons of either?
> 
> You just need to change 'stable' or 'potato' to either woody or sid in
> /etc/apt/sources.list, and then run `apt-get update` and then `apt-get
> dist-upgrade` (the latter you may need to run more than once).
> 
> Sid is more up-to-date, but changes quite often, sometimes for the worse.
> Woody is a bit older in some of its programs, but doesn't change so often,
> and is perhaps more seldom broken.

That's the theory.

The practice is a bit different.  Problems in Sid (the Gtk font-encoding
issue being the most recent notable exception) tend to be resolved
quickly, particularly if they're based on small problems with code or
configuration.

Problems with Woody tend to persist for a while, and sometimes leave the
distro in an inconsistent state.  The problem is that the policy of "ten
days, less bugs" (packages aren't promoted to Woody until they've been
in Sid for ten days and have no serious bugs), means that a buggy
package will be pulled (while those depending on it aren't), and that
its replacement doesn't appear for ten days.

I've run both Sid and Woody systems, and find that the latter is
actually slightly more problematic.  OTOH, we haven't had a "wipe your
data" class of error for quite some time, and your chances of exposure
to this on Sid are far higher than Woody.

Peace.

-- 
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