Chris Lale wrote:
Nigel Henry wrote:On Wednesday 14 February 2007 17:36, Michael S. Peek wrote: [...]Personally, if you have sufficient harddrive space, I'd keep your current Etch install pointing to Etch in /etc/apt/sources.list. then I would install another instance of Etch. I'd keep this pointing to Etch, then when Etch goes stable I'd point /etc/apt/sources.list for your new Etch install to the testing repo. this way you have one install which you know works ok, and the new Etch, now testing/Lenny install.[...][...]
I'm putting this back on the list: Joe Hart wrote:
Chris Lale wrote:And, if you keep /home on a separate partition, your two installs can both use the same /home. Normally work in testing but, if it is broken for a while, use stable until it is fixed.That usually works, but not always. Sometimes different versions of the same program use different configurations settings. You can cripple one system by using another. If all the programs are the same version, of course this doesn't happen, but then what's the point of having the two systems? If the programs are well written, they will not touch items that they don't know about, but not all programmers think of that.
I know there is a theoretical possibility of problems, but its probably only local configuration files that might be modified - the hidden files in the user's home. The only problem I ever had was with Gnome. That was easily fixed by deleting (renaming) the .gnome/.gnome2 directories. They were just recreated automatically when Gnome next ran. I'm not even sure whether sharing the /home partition caused this problem.
-- Chris.