On Thu, Nov 08, 2007 at 07:52:15PM -0800, Jeff Grossman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> was heard to say: > I know this question is going to get a variety of answers, but I would like > to get everybody's opinion. I am currently running Testing with a few > packages from Sid. I just moved to Debian a few weeks ago. I am running > Debian as a home server which handles a website, e-mail server, samba > server, a few other small server applications. I am really the only user > except for e-mail, I have about 4 users total on the system. More than > anything running Linux is a complete learning experience for me. I have > noticed that it takes at least 10 days, if not more, to get updated > packages from unstable to testing. How dangerous would it be for me to > move completely to unstable? Has anybody completely trashed their system > by running unstable? I like to live on the cutting edge, but I also don't > want my machine to completely die where it won't boot up anymore.
I've run unstable on at least one of my machines for 8 years. My experience is that it works fine almost all the time. Oh, and one or two times a year some "little" thing goes wrong. PAM gets upgraded and decides no password you enter is valid. The kernel loses track of your hard drives. An upgrade to the bootloader hoses your initrd. A common library changes SONAME without changing its package name, breaking everything that depends on it. The X server is upgraded and wrecks your display configuration. A libc upgrade breaks everything in sight (or better yet, only breaks a few things in subtle ways it takes you weeks to even notice, generating corrupt data the whole time). A change in the network subsystem means your Internet connection mysteriously fails to work. etc, etc, etc. With the exception of the subtle libc corruption, all of these have happened to me at one time or another. If you can't tolerate and recover from one of these events, I would not recommend running unstable. Daniel -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
