On Sat, 2004-12-25 at 16:48 +0100, Bob Alexander wrote: --snip-- > While I love using sid because of the very current releases and I am > willing to take the risk of having to debug "some" problems, being the > system I WORK with the only I have, getting fundamental things wrong can > seriously impact my job.
While this doesn't actually answer your question about how to check the age of a package, I do feel that I should inject a comment about the relative stability of Sid here. My primary machine at work is a Debian-only machine running Sid AND Experimental. In the last 6 months or so, I have spent probably about 5 - 6 hours working through problems caused by packages on my system, ALL of them caused by Experimental. All of the servers that I use for my day to day work also run Sid, and I've never had a problem with any of them that wasn't caused by user error. Sid is probably not the right choice if you need to run a nuclear defense grid, but for day to day work on the desktop and even on servers, it's plenty stable enough in my experience. With that said, what I usually do for my servers is do an update every two weeks, storing the list of packages that WOULD be upgraded in a text file. Then when I do my next update, I compare that list vs the list of two weeks ago and only install the packages that HAVEN'T changed. This gives me a selection of two week old packages that MOST LIKELY work (since critical bugs are usually fixed within two weeks). -- Alex Malinovich Support Free Software, delete your Windows partition TODAY! Encrypted mail preferred. You can get my public key from any of the pgp.net keyservers. Key ID: A6D24837
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