Re: Opinions -- When will Sid be usable again?
On Sunday 18 September 2005 02:41, William Ballard wrote:
> I started using Woody in Jan 03, and switched to Sid maybe by around
> April, and learned to deal with its unstability and stuck with it until
> Sarge came out. Now I run Sarge, because I expected Sid to become
> horribly unusable. Now my question is, when should I start tracking Sid
> again, because Nice New Things are in it? Obviously this is a silly
> question. But it's my question.
>
> Sit tight on Sarge through at least this winter? Check back next
> Spring?
>
> It's nice not having to do tons of updates, but I don't to be running
> ancient stuff.
>
> -William
Sid really isn't that useful by itself. In 3 years of using (mostly Unstable)
Debian, I always kept testing in my sources configured as a very low
priority. And, I used (a few) packages from testing quite often when there
were long-term dependency quirks for any packages. If you foobar a
dist-upgrade and say Yes to removing all of KDE, at least, with another
repository in your sources you can get KDE back until KDE dependencies are
okay in SID.
Anyway, here were my three rules for using unstable (for myself):
* Always set aside a little bit of time for each upgrade. Sometimes, there are
emergencies, and upgrading will take 10 - 20 minutes because of fancy
maneuvering to get your workspace running again.
* Never use dist-upgrade. (OR, use dist-upgrade rarely. Without spending time
pinning a few packages each time, it usually removes at least one program you
absolutely need to use the next day. Unstable and dist-upgrade--esp. without
a second repository--are as dependable as molewhack.)
* Always have another repository available (and make sure to lower its
priority)
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