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Re: Daily Updates



andy on 11/04/07 20:45, wrote:
Adam Hardy wrote:
andy on 11/04/07 20:12, wrote:
John Hasler wrote:
If I wanted to remain current (w/out being bleeding-edge ala Sid), would I now be adjusting my apt-sources-list to look for "testing" rather than "etch" as they do now?

How risky is this on a workstation/desktop-&-music-&-Net box?

It depends how often you are going to do an across-the-board upgrade of all your packages to stay current, and I guess it depends alot on knowing what you are doing. I guess if you have to ask, you will end up learning alot!

That's what happened to me. I stayed with etch through about 18 months of testing and found every 3 months I would encounter some mind-bending problem concerning things I never knew existed. Would spend an hour or a day sorting it out with help from this list and elsewhere.

Adam, your response was quite provocative!

While I am fascinated by computers and have enjoyed my forays into programming and networking I cannot claim to be anything more than a user who would prefer a trouble-free computing experience, but isn't afraid about getting my hands dirty if need's be. So, on this basis, and noting that I have my trusty update manager doing all of the nitty gritty for me, what am I realistically looking at if I adapt my sources-list to "testing" (as they had been prior to Etch becoming Etch)?

The plot thickens ... :)

Provocative? Not in a negative sense, I hope.

The issues that I ran into were all undoubtedly something that a debian guru would not have had to deal with - I'm sure all the warning signs were there but I just chose to ignore them or didn't recognise them.

Since it happened on average every 3 months and I only had testing for 18, I guess that means it only happened 6 times in all.

It wasn't always the same thing, but one example that I remember was with udev. I accidentally allowed a package to overwrite a config file which I had edited, and I didn't see it happening.

So a couple of things wouldn't work anymore, but it was no great disaster, in fact I didn't even realise straight away, which made the diagnosis of the problem harder. It was because the config I used to have was gone, and I had forgotten the details, since it was a couple of months since I had put in the necessary config first time around.

I guess the moral of the story is, keep notes on all the changes you make, and preferably, devote a bit of time to it.

I needed testing then for the new udev stuff which make it much easier to synch my Palm, so I guess it was worth it.

Adam



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