Michael Grant wrote: > On Tue, Jan 12, 2021 at 10:35:05AM -0500, Dan Ritter wrote: > > Are you running a production system? > > Yes, I guess you could call it production. It's my family & friends server. > In all the time I have been running Debian Testing, I have never once > suffered a serious or protracted disaster as you envision. Maybe I'm lucky! > Little things, yes, like the systemd thing the other day. On very rare > occasions, I have had to pin a package. > > > If so, you should be running buster, and considering moving to > > the next stable release no sooner than a few weeks after the > > transition to bullseye. You should accept security updates as > > soon as is convenient for you, on an ongoing basis. Backports > > are to solve specific issues. > > Is it then possible to add the /testing line to be able to occasionally pull > in specific packages from testing? I think I would need a > preferences.d/something.pref file. > > deb http://mirrors.linode.com/debian/ testing main contrib non-free > deb-src http://mirrors.linode.com/debian/ testing main contrib non-free > > Clearly if the package I wanted to install from testing would suck in a lot > of dependencies, then I likely would not do that, but I don't want it to suck > things in from testing automatically otherwise, I am then running testing. > > Is this setup possible or am I really just going to have to be patient if > something isn't in backports?
Yes. See https://blog.randomstring.org/2016/08/17/debian-backports-pinning/ which gives examples for jessie and jessie-backports, but can easily be translated into buster and testing, if that's what you want. With testing set to priority between 1 and 99, it will only install packages if you explicitly ask for them, say apt install -t testing packagename The caution regarding dependencies that you have mentioned is spot-on. -dsr-
