[Techtalk] dealing with debian

[Mary]

On Sun, Jan 05, 2003, Stephanie Boyd wrote:
> Another thing which you may wish to consider before introducing packages
> from unstable to a stable system is that they may not work:  the package
> itself may depend on newer versions of other packages, which may in turn not
> work with other packages which are already installed on your system.  I
> don't know about openoffice - I've been running it quite happily for some
> time now on testing and it works fine, but this is a consideration.

It is *generally* not so much of a problem to run a mixed
unstable/testing system as it would be to run a mixed unstable/stable
system. Stable systems will be anywhere between a few months to a year
and a half behind unstable, whereas testing will only be a few weeks
behind, barring packages that have 'serious policy violation' bugs filed
against them (the mozilla-snapshot and galeon-snapshot series are
examples), which will never move into testing.

The Mozilla in unstable is currently 1.2.1, which is fairly recent.

> Finally, if you want to run a lot of software which is not available in
> stable, you may wish to consider running testing.  There is a risk attached,
> of course, but it's much easier to get the latest versions of software.
> (WARNING!  Although testing generally works quite well, it is entirely
> possible to hose your system through installing things which don't quite
> work - subscribing to Debian mailing lists to find out 'what's broken'
> before runnning dist-upgrades is a good idea.)

Debian users should be on the security updates list at the very least.
Some of them are quite high volume, though. You might want to wait a
while to upgrade any package and watch the bugs pages instead - serious
bugs will tend to be filed quickly.

-Mary