On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 4:59 PM, Brian van den Broek <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi all, > > My foray into Fedora has come to a close and I am returning to the > debian and debian-derived fold. > > I'd run stable before and found it too stable. So, I was thinking of > running testing. Then, to my surprise, I found that the debian FAQ > recommends unstable over testing > <http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-faq/ch-choosing.en.html>. > The major reason seems to be that problems can persist in testing > longer than they will in stable.
There will usually be a waiting period of at least 10 days before fixes done in unstable are copied over into testing. The waiting time can be longer in the cases where Debian is in Freeze state, which is a point where package copies to testing are stopped while testing is stabilized and release-critical bugs are fixed. Once that's done, testing will actually be equivalent to stable (at release time), and then the cycle starts over for the new development cycle. Debian is currently in freeze. [1] That means testing should currently be pretty stable, and getting considerably more so until release time, at the cost of less new package versions coming in. After release, testing will just be the equivalent of unstable 10 days prior. The side effect is that if you run into a major issue that wasn't caught while the package was in unstable, you'll be stuck with it for 10 days. You can work around that by installing packages from unstable directly by including unstable in your sources.list; and using a technique called pinning. See 'man apt_preferences' for the details... or ask on the list, I'll be happy to share examples. > So, I'm a bit confused about which to choose. Advice? Choose testing; if only because there's a slightly higher chance that issues are caught while new packages are still in unstable and not yet transitioned to testing. If you want something really safe though, better stick with stable. It's not super old at this point, and there will be a new Debian release eventually (like, reasonably soon, though I can't say when). > As I've already downloaded a stable live CD, my plan was to install > that, then update the repos to point at testing, and possibly once > again to point at unstable. So, unless I misunderstand the way things > work, I can try testing for a while and then go to unstable if > desired. (I do understand that testing -> unstable is largely a > one-way journey.) Does that install plan sound sound to those with > experiencing running other than stable debian? Installing from stable and upgrading to testing or unstable should work. I sometimes used that to install my debian system. You could run into issues though, since the upgrading process from the current stable version to what will be the new one hasn't necessarily all been tested. If it's a new install, it should be fine. If you run stable for a while before, install a bunch of packages, and upgrade to testing/unstable then, you could have surprises. [1] - https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/06/msg00009.html / Matt _______________________________________________ mlug mailing list [email protected] https://listes.koumbit.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mlug-listserv.mlug.ca
