[Techtalk] Debian freezes

[Mary]

On Sat, Mar 08, 2003, Subba Rao wrote:
> One thing I like about Debian is the "apt" package.  I have installed
> several packages via the net very conveniently.  However I do not know
> if there are any best practices in setting up "sources.list".  When I
> wanted some package I would add the source to the sources.list file
> and then update my system. Is this a sound practice?

Most people do simply add new sources and run "apt-get update"

You may wish to learn to use aptitude. You can run it just like apt-get
- "aptitude update", "aptitude dist-upgrade", or if you just run
  "aptitude" it will start up a curses interface.

Just because the interface is "more friendly" doesn't mean that aptitude
is particularly easy to run, I'd strongly suggest reading the docs. But
it does allow you more control over which packages are installed, lets
you view dependencies and so on.

There's a list of unofficial package repositories at
http://www.apt-get.org/

> PS - Please do not send me URLs and say go and read that.

Well, if there's a 10 page informative document would you rather I typed
it out, or that I gave you a link? In cases where there's a good URL, I
will give that rather than waste my time re-writing it for you, only
worse.

That doesn't apply in this case, but stipulating conditions on how
people can help you just results in less help.

> deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main contrib non-free

Good and necessary. I can't comment on the rest of the lines, but you
*may* want to consider using "testing" instead of "stable" as per
jennyw's advice. Stable will remain almost totally unchanged, save for
security updates, for about two year periods, and then a massive upgrade
will happen. Many people prefer incremental.

-Mary
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