Re: Am i playing with fire?

[Miles Fidelman <mfidelman@meetinghouse.net>]

green wrote:
> Mark Panen wrote at 2011-09-25 06:31 -0500:
> > Some packages i want to install on my Squeeze machine just don't have
> > the right dependencies or packages, so i take what i need from
> > testing. Am i going to bork my installation?
> Perhaps, but probably not (according to my experience).  Use packages from
> backports instead, if available.
>
> I mix stable/testing/unstable often with very little trouble.  But I am
> careful about what packages I upgrade, and my system is always either "mostly
> stable" or "mostly testing".  Generally, stand-alone packages can be upgraded
> without any trouble, but core packages should be left alone.  The more
> reverse dependencies a package has, the more careful you should be about
> upgrading it.

sort of depends on the packages

for o/s and core packages, I tend to rely on oldstable (i.e., Lenny) - I 
try to keep a stable environment

for servers and applications (e.g., mailing list manager, blog engine) - 
where currency tends to be important - I generally download and build 
the upstream source - it takes a little more work to make sure 
dependencies are in place, but I find that the upstream make files are 
more reliable than the bleeding edge packaging.  At least in my case, a 
lot of the packages I use are developed on Debian - so the upstream 
source is as good or better than the packaging.

specific example:  I run a lot of mailing lists of one machine (actually 
a VM):
- hypervisor (Xen) and O/S (Lenny) - basic installs, rely on apt- to 
keep stuff current
- LAMP (the AMP part) - rely on apt-
- mail stuff (Postfix, Spamassassin, ClamAV, avavisd) - again, rely on 
apt- but... requires some manual wiring together
- perl - rely on apt- for core; rely on cpan to update
- sympa - the mail list manager, built in perl - install from source - 
it's makefile invokes cpan to install dependencies (but doesn't always 
get things right - sometimes have to invoke cpan manually); then it 
builds and runs just fine -- the upstream version is always several revs 
ahead of the Debian packages, and I've yet to find a packaged version 
that actually installs cleanly

granted, it's a bit harder to manage a system when one goes around the 
package manager, but sometimes you can get better results

Miles Fidelman


--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In<fnord>  practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra