Re: Another "testing" vs "unstable" question
On Sun, Jun 20, 2004 at 11:13:37AM -0500, Michael Satterwhite wrote:
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> I've been watching the various discussions on this, and note that most
> experienced types think that the unstable distribution is better than the
> testing distribution. This leads me to one more question / observation
>
> A few weeks ago (I don't know about now), the KDE distribution in unstable
> simply would not run. I've noted several of the messages recommending the
> unstable branch say that there were some updates that caused the receiving
> machines to crash / lock / not start.
>
> How does one recover from something like this short of doing a reload? For
> that matter, a reload should crash the same way as it's getting the same
> software. I may be missing something - quite likely, BTW, I'll admit total
> ignorance here - but it would appear that it wouldn't take many of these
> incidents to make the testing branch seem A LOT better than unstable.
Your concerns are valid. Another example: ghostscript 8 is worthless. It
renders very badly (documents look ugly) and won't render a lot of pdf
files that ghostscript 7 rendered without problems.
Now to answer your question: you first have to isolate the problem. If
you have, you can downgrade to the version of testing or the last
package in your /var/cache/apt/archives or add snapshot.debian.net to
your sources. For example, I have downgraded my ghostscript packages and
put them on hold. I will check the status of ghostcript 8 in some time.
Most really ugly problems are fixed within a day. If not, you can always
wait it out as it will generally sort itself out in a few days.
> Other than this, the arguments for the unstable over testing seem valid.
And that's why a lot of people tend to take the uncommon problems for
granted.
HTH,
David
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