Joel Lopez wrote:
Thanks Matthew, I did want to have a mixed system. Stable as the base and the bleeding edge for just KDE at he moment. But maybe even something else newer in the future if I find a new feature that I'd like to try.
For the specific case of KDE, it looks like that isn't going to work, because there's no backport of KDE as far as I can tell. The basic theory is sound though.
I read about modifying the sources file that apt uses to include stable andtesting but I'm afraid to mess up my box if it doesn't work smoothly.
I believe that apt just selects the newest version of any package, so if you have both stable and testing in sources.list it'll just end up picking the testing version every time. However, packages that have been dropped from testing will still show up for you. This is bad, because they might depend on out-dated versions of libraries. You'd end up with woody packages depending on *exactly* foo version 1.1, while sarge packages depend on *exactly* version 2.3, and you'll have no way of resolving the conflict, and aptitude won't give you any indication of why everything's so messed up.
So better all round just to stick to one distribution.
I was hoping someone had tried this before and can point me to some docs that could guide me through it.
Unfortunately stable is a moving target, so any document saying "watch out for foo, it seems to have problems with the upgrade" will quickly become meaningless. All anyone can say is edit the sourcefile, fire up aptitude, and cross your fingers. When I made the switch a year or so ago I found myself in all kinds of mess, but that was because I'd modified lots of config files, and because sarge was somewhat less stable at that point. You might have more luck, but I wouldn't count on doing anything really important with your computer for a couple of days. Keep a Knoppix CD nearby :-)
Without wanting to dive into the testing vs. unstable controversy, I'd probably recommend setting sources.list to sarge explicitly. At this particular point in time, with sarge being so "late", it's reasonable for users wanting a reasonably modern system to take this risk. But when sarge gets released (Real Soon Now...) it'll automatically keep you pinned to stable, rather than the post-sarge free-for-all that will be the unstable distribution in a few months time. If Debian lives up to its promise of 12 month release cycles, you could probably then switch to "stable" and still be reasonably up-to-date without ever having to change it again.