Re: What are your best practices for running Debian unstable?
Hi,
On Sat, Mar 12, 2011 at 07:07:50PM +0000, darkestkhan wrote:
You know you are arguing with people who have been using sid under
controlled and considerate ways for YEARS. (Not just a year.)
> 2011/3/12 John Hasler <jhasler@debian.org>:
> > darkestkhan writes:
> >> ...I don't see a reason why should I do dist-upgrade, after all I'm
> >> running sid constantly...
> >
> > Because the sort of inter-release changes dist-upgrade is intended to
> > handle can happen in Sid at any time.
> I'm running sid / experimental so dist-upgrade in my case is almost
> like throwing away half of the system;
I wonder if this is because you are not used to deal with such situation.
When I see problem using dist-upgrade, I may fall back to use
safe-upgrade etc. But I try to use dist-upgrade after short transition
period so my system does not become too skewed from the expected package
transition.
....
> Also frequent ( I'm doing upgrade at least 2 times a day ) upgrades
> are really sorting out most of inter-release changes that may ( or may
> not ) happen in Sid.
You are free to enjoy your masochistic taste but advocating such things
to unsuspected others may not be a good thing. safe-upgrade is useful
but not bullet proof. It comes with some negatives.
> Also packages in Sid or experimental can have unsatisfied
> dependencies.
That is how they are designed to be.
> > Osamu writes:
> >These are not bad idea but not that essential.
> >
> >You have to have a rescue media or another relatively new content
> >partition which you can use to boot your system after you broke it with
> >upgrade. Dual boot + Rescue GRUB disk is something I always use to save
> >my recovery time.
>
> For entire year ( I started using GNU/Linux year ago and from the
> beginning I was using sid / experimnetal ) of running sid /
> experimental I never had to recover my system.
You are playing with "unstable" archive after it went through most of
major transition. You are lucky. In early squeeze release cycle, I was
unfortunate enough to hit few glitches in packaging bugs while using
"unstable" archive. GRUB and mkinitrd related bugs were not so nice.
Dual boot + Rescue GRUB were essential for my recovery. (Also I needed
rEFIt which is specific for MacBook.)
Regards,
Osamu
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