Mike Bird wrote: > Updating Testing workstations has proved to be much more > time-consuming than expected. >
> In the last four months there have been approx 13,000 > package updates in Testing, of which approx 1,000 > applied to a typical workstation here. > > During the same period there were approx 800 package > updates in Stable, of which approx 160 applied to a > typical workstation here. There is a big difference between the two. The updates to stable almost always work without breaking other components on the system. That is, you can be safe in thinking that there are no new bugs introduced into your systems. The updates to testing do not always work. Even if they work, many of these upgrades consist of "new upstream releases". Rest assured, you can be sure that your systems now have more bugs than they were before. I am strongly against the idea of using testing or Sid for production systems. Use Debian Stable if you want to get things done without worrying about your OS. > > Unfortunately, we only have one workstation that can run > Stable. Some need Testing and most need a combination > of Testing and Unstable. In particular, xserver-xorg 7.3 > is only available in Unstable although Ubuntu is already > shipping 7.3 in their long-term-support release. We often > have to use an Unstable kernel too, although that's not > currently the case. Please explain. Based on your other posts on the list, I imagine you know what you are doing. But for non-insiders like me, it is not clear why stable does not work for you? Is it hardware recognition problem or some software related issue? If it is one or two packages, then backports might help (or custom built packages for that matter). For example, On my production system I use Etch. But I need latest software related to numerical analysis (octave, maxima, gfortran etc.,), plotting capabilities (gnuplot), typesetting capabilities (latex, texmacs) etc., So I run stable for the most part and compile the other packages myself or pull them from testing, unstable, backports as and when necessary. But after installing these packages I redirect my sources.list back to Stable so that no updates from testing/unstable get into my system inadvertantly. I can use apt-pinning etc., but I like the manual method (may be I am a masochist :-)) > We could (a) continue using Debian Testing, or (b) try > Ubuntu (again), or (c) ... ? You can try Ubuntu. But so far my experience with users who shifted from Debian to Ubuntu tells me that they will eventually come back to Debian after a year or so. May be Debian is some kind of black hole with infinite attracting power :-) LOL! hth raju -- Kamaraju S Kusumanchi http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/kk288/ http://malayamaarutham.blogspot.com/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]