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Re: How automatic are backport package updates?



Replying to this message that's just over a month old now.  Now that
10.8 just came out, is this a good time to jump off the testing repo
and onto stable for my production box?  Is this one of those rare
moments when testing and stable line up?  Or should I continue to wait
for Bullseye?

On Tue, Jan 12, 2021 at 10:35:05AM -0500, Dan Ritter wrote:
> Michael Grant wrote: 

>> Let's say I want to run 'testing' to be more on the edge to get the
>> latest and greatest of packages and to incrementally always be on top
>> of updates rather than having to do large release updates.  But from
>> time to time there is a security update to a package which is newer,
>> or if something specific is broken, I may want to go back to a
>> specific version of something.  What should I put in my sources.list?
> 
> Are you running a production system?

Yes.

> That is, are you running a Debian system which is essential to
> your business or personal activities, so that having to recover
> from a disaster would be a significant hardship?

Well, yes, though I do have daily snapshots.

> If so, you should be running buster, and considering moving to
> the next stable release no sooner than a few weeks after the
> transition to bullseye. You should accept security updates as
> soon as is convenient for you, on an ongoing basis. Backports
> are to solve specific issues.
> 
> If you are running a system for fun, or if there is no real
> issue with protracted unavailability, testing is a fine thing
> to be running. You should expect a little chaos every time you
> update.
> 
> Only stable gets security updates. Testing may get security
> updates when they come from upstream, but it's not guaranteed.

I thought all security updates were tested in testing, committed to
testing, and then also committed to stable-security.  I had not
noticed that testing was not getting security updates, I thought it
was, maybe again, it was just luck that the packages I noticed needed
security updates were the ones I mentally track most like sendmail,
dovecot, spamassassin...

Michael Grant

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