On Thursday, 3 September 2015 09:20:02 UTC+1, Christian Hilberg wrote: > Hi Brad, > > Am Mittwoch 02 September 2015, 16:16:10 schrieb Brad Rogers: > > On Wed, 02 Sep 2015 10:21:47 -0400 > > Gary Dale <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > Hello Gary, > > > > >Yesterday I rebooted my computer but when it came back up and I logged > > >in, Plasma was no longer usable. > > > > Come on Gary, you've been on this ML long enough to know that KDE is > > going through some *massive* changes ATM. The path from KDE4 to > > KF5/Plasma is far from an easy one to tread. Not least because of the > > change to GCC v5. KF5/Plasma is very, /very/ different from KDE4. It's > > not a huge surprise, to me at any rate, that some packages don't (yet) > > have their dependencies sorted out fully. > > > > If one finds, when doing an update, it's necessary to remove large > > numbers of packages to get everything updated then one should pause and > > consider; Do I really want to lose half of my software suite? Usually > > the answer is "no". In that case, see what can be updated without > > ripping the heart out of your system. > > > > Testing sometimes has breakage. Sometimes that breakage is big. You > > just have to deal with it. If you can't.... > > > > ....there's always stable. > > To me, that kind of breakage (due to the transitions KDE4->KF5 *and* > GCC4->GCC5 at the same time) is what we're used to see in unstable. > This is what unstable is for, imho. > > By letting these transitions happen simultaneously in unstable as well > as testing, the ML became flooded with all-the-same-topic mails over > and over, because many people are using testing who do so because they > like to be more recent than stable while not daring enough to expedition > into unstable land. > > I guess it might have been wiser to let the transitions happen in > unstable, since the massive breakage you mention was to be expected, > and have the smaller issues and oversights ironed out in testing. > This scheme worked out quite well in the past. > > Kind regards, > Christian
If we don't want breakage, we have to use stable. The primary purpose of testing is to develop the next release, not necessarily to produce a user-focused version of stable with newer packages. Last time I looked, warnings about this were liberally included in Debian documentation and wiki pages. I have had my fair share of breakages using unstable, and trying to find my way out of them is usually quite educational. If I'm too busy at the time, I can always ssh my way to my data from another machine. Failing that, a live image. anxiousmac
