Re: Debian Desktop for a Joe Average
On Thu, Oct 02, 2003 at 08:40:40PM +0200, David Fokkema wrote:
> On Thu, 2003-10-02 at 16:58, Colin Watson wrote:
> > On Thu, Oct 02, 2003 at 09:43:26AM -0500, Ron Johnson wrote:
> > > Don't go directly from stable to unstable!! Too radical
> >
> > It's not significantly more radical than stable to testing. I don't
> > think there's much benefit in trying to go from stable to unstable via
> > testing, especially considering that there are things broken in testing
> > that work in unstable for one reason or another (e.g. apt-listchanges).
>
> I'm sorry, I have to disagree with you on this one. Several people on
> this list have complained about broken dependencies and uninstallable
> packages when upgrading from stable to unstable. Upgrading to testing
> and then to unstable solved their problems. I was one of them and IIRC,
> I've responded to at least two others on this list with the same
> problems.
I don't recall this. Could you elaborate or give me a pointer?
Such problems are possible in testing too, BTW (normally they're
prevented but the RM sometimes overrides the consistency checks upon
taking a decision that upgrading some other package is more important),
and they usually take longer to be fixed. If you look at the list of
packages currently uninstallable in testing, most of them have been
there for some time.
I'm not saying testing shouldn't be better than unstable (it should),
just that unilaterally saying that stable->unstable is "too radical" is
bogus. One half of the intent of testing is to be as up-to-date as
possible with respect to unstable; it's not supposed to be halfway in
between. And, if the upgrade from stable to unstable is too radical,
then I would respectfully suggest that you might be best off avoiding
unstable altogether.
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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