Re: Switching to unstable
On Wed, 2003-03-12 at 00:08, Stephen A. Witt wrote:
> On Tue, 11 Mar 2003, Matthias Szupryczynski wrote:
> > I am thinking to switch from stable to unstable these days. Is this
> > advisable at the moment, or is the unstable branch suffering from mayor
> > problems right now (libc broken etc.)
>
> Why do you want to do that? I'm not running any machines on unstable at
> the present time, but I have in the past. You have to realize that if you
> run unstable and keep upgrading from time to time, then you will possibly
> get a package that breaks your system in some significant way. That said,
> there are times when you "must have" some package or version of a package
> that is only available in unstable and so, for that reason, you take the
> risk of running it. That's really the crux of it, how willing are you to
> suffer problems due to immature packages in unstable.
A couple of packages I need are only available in sid, thus my thoughts
about upgrading. Since the machine in question isn't needed for any
serious stuff at the moment, I could live with the risk of a few minor
problems, even if they result in an unusable system from time to time.
The point is just that I do not know how serious problems can be under
unstable. If a typical broken package situation (since this is what I
expect under sid) can just be solved by downloading and compiling the
relevant sources by hand I wouldn't care, but as I said, I don't know
what I would have to deal with.
> My advice is not to run unstable unless there is some very good reason for
> doing so (but this is based on my assumption that you pretty much want a
> working system). If you do you MUST be prepared for problems to crop up,
> unstable is used for integrating new packages/new versions into the Debian
> software baseline. The whole purpose of doing software intergration is to
> find and fix these kind of issues. It also isn't so important if there are
> no problems in unstable right now, new/modified packages continually come
> into unstable so it is usually changing.
Thanks for that, I wasn't aware how fast unstable is changing. The way
you describe it, any apt-get upgrade under unstable can render my system
in a pretty useless state due to some changes that happened in the last
days.
> Another very nice thing (IMHO) that Debian did beginning with woody, I
> think, is the addition of "testing". testing is more stable than unstable
> so if there is some reason why you need a package not in stable, check
> testing to see if it is there.
As already pointed out by Bill, running testing and only getting the
really needed packages from unstable seems to be the sensible way
between rock-stable and bleeding edge.
Thanks
Matt
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