Bruno,And do you think it pays off, to manage your machine this way? I mean, is sid worth the work? With time, I have come to think that, in reality, every program that I tried to install I succeeded, in one way or another. Be it by compiling, checkinstalling, apt-get... which is why debian is my choice. Except for one or another stubborn (but not critical) softwares, I have everything I need. Back in my suse days, compilation was a faded-to-failure option. I also have the feeling that the more you learn, the less important the differences between debian flavours are. My current sarge install has things from backports, a bunch of compiled software, and even some small things from etch and sid (the mix that ron called 'recipe for disaster', hehehe...) so it's not even a out-of-the-box sarge system, anymore. the exiv2 package, the reason for this thread, was installed by checkinstall, for example, with minimal effort. Now I have a .deb which is reinstallable, if needed. Isn't this one of the beauties of the whole thing? The flexibility and freedom of choice debian gives us?I've been running sid for nearly two years with no REAL problems as my main work machine. I do mostly business type stuff -- word proc., email, browsing, accounting and little multi-media stuff now and then. It works really well. The main thing is to use apt-listbugs and watch debian-user for potential problems before doing an upgrade. Also, it pays to watch the list of upgradeable packages very closely. If there is any kind of big move happening, I'll usually postpone my upgrade for a week or two to see what happens. If a big set of upgrades causes a big spurt of activity on debian-user, then I'll wait even a little longer for things to sort themselves out. I probably do an upgrade on a roughly weekly basis though occaisionaly I'll wait as long as a month (like when xorg moved in...). my understanding is that in sid things break more often, but are fixed much faster than in testing. If something breaks in testing it can be a long time before it comes back.
That's why i'm asking you if is sid worth the extra work.The situation of sarge today is not as bad as the last days of woody. When I first installed it, a default install was like ext2, kernel 2.2, kde 2.2(?... can't remember exactly..?). By that time, everybody was runing kernel 2.6...
I just remembered I must have a qemu virtual sid machine lying around in a backup. Its the only choice here, as I completely lack the disk space for a dual boot. Luckily, i didn't do get/set selections across releases, but just across upgrades. Thanks for calling my attention to this, as I would probably not notice and a release-upgrade would certainly catch me on that.If you're nervous about taking the plunge, maybe you could dual boot sarge and sid for a while? also, I think you have to be careful using --get|set-selections across releases as package names change... ymmv etc. A