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Re: Which release



Mario Vukelic, Sat, Sep 06, 2003 at 01:20:42AM +0200: 
> I'v run stable, testing and unstable. In you case, I would start with
> stable. Most software in Linux is so mature these days that it doesn't
> really matter if it's all that recent for the most part. Desktop
> environments (Gnome, KDE) are an exception, but you can get good
> (unofficial) backports to stable at http://www.apt-get.org
> 
> You should also consider Libranet, it's a commercial distro based on
> Debian, with a friendlier installer and more recent packages than
> stable.
> 
> Avoid testing!! Testing is for testing /the distribution/ and is quite
> f****d most of the time, as packages trickle in from unstable in a quite
> random manner. E.g., Gnome in testing is severely broekn, since some
> packages of 2.2 are in testing, but other important packages are helb ub
> by bugs.
> 
> Unstable is ok, it's not so much the packages that are unstable, but the
> package list changes frequently. It has mostly very recent packages that
> are considered stable by upstream. However, be prepared that it does
> impose quite much qork on the admin: config files have to be updated
> frequently, since every time new package version come in. Also, you
> should have a working bootdisk and be able to fix a system you can't
> boot or log into by normal means. It happens very seldom, but it may.
> You can avoid that by reading the debian-devel mailing list /before/ you
> do an "apt-get update; update upgrade". Problems are reported there very
> quickly.
> 

Another option if you are running a largish site: run stable and compile
any packages that you need a more recent version of.

apt-get build-dep foo && apt-get source foo --compile 

will work for most packages.  If it doesn't you can make any changes
needed and use dpkg-buildpackage or debian/rules (the package makefile).

[ assumes your sources.list has deb-src entries for unstable/testing ]

After a while you'll have enough packages that building a local archive
will make your life easier (see apt-ftparchive or dpkg-scanpackages ).

Note: this really doesn't apply to the original question, I just wanted
to point out that there is another options beside doing the unstable
tango.

g


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