Re: updating debian 8 (jessie) stable to permanent testing - SOLVED?
On Mon 25 Jan 2016 at 19:11:40 (-0500), Francis Gerund wrote:
> [...]
> It's not that simple. Years ago, I followed advice to upgrade to
> testing by just "edit your /etc/apt/sources.list changing 'stable' (or
> the current codename for stable) in the apt lines to 'testing' (or the
> current code name for the next stable release".
>
> The results were disastrous.
>
> So again, perhaps some automated mechanism for upgrading might be
> beneficial. Or at least some elaboration or amplification of the
> documentation on this subject. And how about a simple guide to "this
> is how you update to testing"?
There can be no such document. If you read the section "How Debian
Testing Works", you'll realise that the instantaneous contents of
testing is essentially random, depending on which packages entered it
when. So there's no guarantee that any step-by-step guide would lead
to a successful upgrade unless it was re-edited every time a package
entered testing: manifestly impossible.
The onus is on you to check the list of packages that any upgrade
affects before you give it the go-ahead. Also bear in mind that the
Security Team does not maintain testing, so security updates arrive
"at random" from unstable no sooner than normal updates do.
> And the more I think about it, the more I stand behind my opinion that
> upgrading is unnecessarily difficult and error-prone.
Debian developers expend their efforts on the packages themselves.
If you consider that being able to painlessly upgrade to testing
is an important goal, then you are free to expend *your* effort in
*that* direction; but you may not receive much help from others.
> >> 3) No, I don't want to make it easy to break my system, but I do
> >> want/need to track testing. Stable is just too stale.
There may be other distributions that track more up-to-date suites
of software. Many of us need the stability of Debian, thank you.
> >> I have read/heard all the warnings about system breakage. I do back
> >> up my data. And I can reinstall if necessary.
Not necessarily. There are times when the particular mix of packages
in testing make that very difficult because certain key packages
get out of sync. You might want to run something like apt-cacher-ng
on a stable machine to preserve previous versions.
> >> I have begun to suspect that the Debian "powers that be" deliberately
> >> don't make upgrading to testing/unstable/experimental clear and easy,
> >> in order to discourage people from doing it. Speculating upon the
> >> reasons that might be is left as an exercise for the reader . . .
There's no lack of people running testing and unstable. Bear in mind
that the developers depend on those very people to *do the testing*
that testing is designed for. OK, plenty of people probably run
testing in the way you obviously want to, ie just as a more up-to-date
version, but what testing requires is people to exercise it, find the
bugs, report them, and possibly write patches to fix them. Only that
will result in a good stretch-as-stable version down the road.
And when stretch is released, so will be a simple upgrade path from
jessie to stretch, all documented in great detail.
Cheers,
David.
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