Debian sid and "risk management"
Background considerations, question follows:
When I was studying as a doctor (a loooong time ago) my Pharmacology
professor told us:
"A good doctor is never the first to use a new medicine and never the
last to abandon an old one"
and later on my sailplane instructor told me:
"There are old pilots and bold pilots but NO old bold pilots"
While I love using sid because of the very current releases and I am
willing to take the risk of having to debug "some" problems, being the
system I WORK with the only I have, getting fundamental things wrong can
seriously impact my job.
Just as an example, in the moment I write, synaptic tells me I could
upgrade LVM2, login, and HAL. If these bomb I would be in trouble. If
xpdf bombed it would be a little annoying but nothing more.
One solution for the "fundamental packages" (please do not call me
coward but only cautious) would be, (like the medicine example on top)
to wait a little time (say one week ten days) before installing any new
packages and before that checking if/which serious bugs have been reported.
I am aware that I would leave the braver doing "first line fighting" and
I would be there too if I haved any of the following:
a) more free time
b) another test machine
c) using Linux not as my primary work environment
Questions:
Is there data in the package system to assess the date of the release of
a given package ?
Is there an automatic way to check even only for the number of severe
bugs for a package from any of the package manager frontends ?
Thank you very much,
Bob
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