Re: Safest maintenance of a sid system

[Celejar <celejar@gmail.com>]

On Tue, 28 Jul 2009 10:34:19 +0900
Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org> wrote:

> AG <computing.account@googlemail.com> writes:
> > As an aside, I noticed that none of the respondents picked up on the
> > scripts sxmi, et al.  Is that because of a lack of experience with
> > these, or because they are no good, or possibly because they are
> > superfluous from the perspective of an experienced sid user?
> 
> I think such things are hardly necessary.
> 
> Sid is not a monster, really all that's necessary to avoid the (very
> occasional) problems is a bit of sense.  The normal mechanisms work very
> well.

It's not always quite that simple, although it usually is.  A year ago,
I was hit by this:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=491114

Here's my tale of woe:

http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2008/07/msg01704.html

Fortunately, Sven Joachim pointed me toward the relevant bug, and I was
soon back to normal.

I think John Hasler's point  (which he often makes) is an excellent
one.  We Sid users have a psychological need to keep our systems up to
date, but there's really no technical reason for that.  As long as one
keeps track of security issues, there's really no point in compulsively
updating, unless one wants to provide the community with the service of
bug-finding, i.e. volunteering as guinea pig ;)

Celejar
--
mailmin.sourceforge.net - remote access via secure (OpenPGP) email
ssuds.sourceforge.net - A Simple Sudoku Solver and Generator