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Re: How to update Debian 11 source.list to testing?



On 03/09/2021 11:40, The Wanderer wrote:
On 2021-09-03 at 10:17, Roberto C. Sánchez wrote:

On Fri, Sep 03, 2021 at 04:11:49PM +0200, Richard Forst wrote:

If you change all instances of bullseye -> testing, then you are not
mixing. Go ahead with that, modulo the standard caveats associated
with running testing. The problem would come if you tried to include
both bullseye *and* testing sources in your sources.list. Then you
might create very difficult to resolve problems.
Are you sure about that last part?

I have been running with (e.g.)

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ stable main non-free contrib
deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ testing main non-free contrib

for over a decade, and while there have been some problems, I think
they've been basically the same ones I'd have seen from running testing
alone; none of them have seemed terribly difficult to resolve, either.
(At least not by my standards, although I'll admit that I may not be the
best or most representative example.)

I don't particularly consider this mixing releases; it's more tracking
testing, while still keeping available any packages which were in stable
but have been removed from testing.

IMO, if you're going to track testing at all on a production computer
(as opposed to, well, for the purpose of actually *testing the upcoming
release*), it only makes sense to also include stable; there's too much
chance of an important package being (temporarily or permanently)
unavailable, otherwise.

But there's a chance that the version in stable is not installable anymore because it depends on packages that have been upgraded on testing and are incompatible with stable.

That said, I agree with you that there's a bit of exaggeration about mixing releases. Sure, it's not something to be recommended to a beginner or someone who's used to just clicking "Next >" to install/upgrade software, but provided one knows what they are doing and are careful when running apt-get (or equivalents), it's certainly possible and won't lead to guaranteed breakage.


--
  Goes (Went) over like a lead balloon.

Eduardo M KALINOWSKI
eduardo@kalinowski.com.br


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