Re: What to do when testing come to stable on a Debian wheezy/sid?
On Fri, 22 Jun 2012 13:55:55 -0400
Gary Dale <garydale@rogers.com> wrote:
> You miss the point of sid. It's not a distribution the way Wheezy is.
> It's a place to put packages for testing before they enter into the
> general testing pool. Testing against sid is almost useless when you
> really want to know if the package is ready for Wheezy.
You may be thinking of Experimental. Both sid and testing are full
usable distributions, testing being a rolling distribution some of the
time, sid all of the time. Have a look at some random packages in the
Debian list, and you will see that many are at the same version in both
sid and testing. Packages that don't break badly in a mere ten days or
so in sid are promoted to testing, if they are not new packages which
arrived after the freeze.
If sid and testing were significantly different, sid would be of no use
for pre-testing the packages before moving them to the testing
distribution. The overall environment must be pretty much the same. Once
testing is frozen, they do diverge somewhat more, but sid still cannot
be structurally altered in a way that would make it impossible to
support testing. *That* happens immediately after release, when the new
packages in sid held up by the testing freeze are moved quickly into
testing, and sid is partly rebuilt toward the aims of the next release,
while remaining a usable distribution at all times. Users of both
distributions then live in interesting times for a month or so.
>
> If you run into a problem with a package from sid, you can say it
> doesn't work with Wheezy. However, if your system is entirely sid,
> all you can say it that it's not compatible with other sid packages.
> Since those packages haven't been vetted for the next release, the
> problem could be anywhere.
>
> Basic rule of problem resolution is change one thing at a time. When
> you're running sid, everything changes all the time.
>
>
No, not really. Updates are running about 100MB a day on my system, but
that's still a small fraction of my installed packages. Even then,
some software changes often, like LibreOffice, and most of the structure
hardly changes at all. Debian isn't like Windows, it's not tightly
'integrated', as the MS marketing people like to say. Most individual
packages can be upgraded in any order, and when a new version has a
problem, it can be downgraded to the previous version. Where there are
groups of packages which *are* integrated among themselves, then most
of them cannot be upgraded until all are ready. But even here, choosing
the upgrade order can allow some packages to be upgraded, and indeed
there is sometimes a correct order to make the upgrade of the whole
group.
Where there is difficulty tracking down problems, it's something that
will happen in every Linux distribution. Sound and vision are the prime
examples, with both being dependent on many different packages, from
hardware drivers down to udev. Looking only at the packages which have
just been updated is not necessarily the answer, as a new version of
one package may expose a hidden bug in another. Recently, I could no
longer start Synaptic from its menu entry. This had been immediately
caused by a new Synaptic version, but only because it now did something
differently. The true cause is somewhere else entirely, possibly in
GTK, or possibly GTK is giving me an error message because of a bug in
something else entirely.
--
Joe
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