On Thu, May 03, 2007 at 11:24:56AM -0400, Jan Sneep wrote: > > > > -----Original Message----- > > From: Andrew Sackville-West [mailto:andrew@farwestbilliards.com] > > Sent: May 3, 2007 10:44 AM > > To: debian-user@lists.debian.org > > Subject: Re: Dangers of "stable" in sources.list > > > > mildly humorous to think someone could be *surprised* by a debian > > release ;-O. > > Actually I was ... not sure if it was mentioned here on the list or not ? well, the list traffic certainly went through the roof when it happened including lots of "congratulations on the release" posts, but really, I was only making a lame joke about the snail's pace of debian releases. Something I fully get and appreciate, BTW. [...] > > > > just a guess, but maybe so that no matter when you install, that > > install disk will get you moving into stable. so you could use a > > really old installer and automatically move right up to stable with > > the next dist-upgrade. > > > > I had a NetInstall CD of Sarge that I made in January and when I did the > update last week I lost everything. I found I couldn't use that CD it get > Etch installed. It would crap-out because it was trying to replace the > kernel from the CD with the one from the mirror and kaboom! No go. hmm.. yeah, I guess that makes sense, now that I actually apply my brain to it. There are ways to work around it, but from the newbie perspective, they are less than ideal. > > > > also, ISTM, that if you are paying attention at all, you'd notice when > > the change happened. If you do a regular dist-upgrade, there will > > suddenly be a pile of upgrades instead of the usual trickle. THat > > should be enough to cause one to review what is happening and hold off > > on an upgrade if its necessary. > > > > Not really a, IMHO, very good way to make sure someone doesn't make the > mistake I made ... REALLY should have some check built in to ALL the various > methods one can use to do an update to FLAG that you are about to perform > and UPGRADE not just an UPDATE. with all due respect, and only the best of intentions, the Apt system always asks if you really want to do what you are about to do. (unless you're installing 1 and only 1 package). I will agree though that if one isn't up to speed yet, they'd not recognise that upgrading a couple hundred packages is not a normal situation for the stable distribution. I hadn't done an update since I installed > Sarge back in January, because I didn't know how. Read some of the posts to > this list that in effect said that Aptitude was the way to go, so read what > I though I needed from the user guide and it's "marketing" message confirmed > that Aptitude was the next-best-thing-to-sliced-bread as it would manage all > the dependancies automatically that with other methods you would have to do > manually. So I with great confidence told it to go and update everything for > me! Well as you know I lost everything. are you refering here to your netowrk problem and your reinstalling? if so, its really not fair to blame that on the apt system :). Had to get a new Etch NetInst CD and > start over again. The ONLY good side to this is that I'm getting pretty good > at running the NetInst CD and have almost all the prompts memorized ... :O) wait til you learn how to have it install everything automatically, including answering all the questions :) > > I guess if we're taking votes ... cast my newbie vote for using the name > rather than "stable" ... Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting one method over the other, just trying to point out how I think it works. you are free to use whichever method you choose. A
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature