On 11/26/2017 09:19 PM, Michael Gilbert wrote: > From: Jens Reyer >> Clearly something wrong here, buster/sid mixed with stable. I'm closing >> the bug because mixed systems are not supported. > > This is a common misconception about Debian. Mixed suites are a > supported, although not very well advertised, feature. Of course, everyone is free to run a mixed setup. I've also done stable+testing for a long time in the past. And there are good chances that it works, as long as you know how to solve package conflicts. But the longer you are in a release cycle, with more transitions having happened, the harder it will get to solve these issues, and you will have to go more and more to a pure buster setup.
And so far this is only for the package relations with known issues, which resulted in e.g. versioned dependencies. I'm not aware of any infrastructure which tests mixed setups, any maintainers which test their buster packages in stretch and officially advertise this as feature, or any user support channel which is generally helping here. In the wiki we explicitly discourage doing this (https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian#Don.27t_make_a_FrankenDebian). Users of this feature need to know that they're on their own when doing this, and that they cannot expect any support. Sending them this route might seem to be a good solution in the beginning, but it might end very bad for them in the long run. At least they most probably won't have stable with just-this-app-from testing, but instead either a mostly testing system, or a not-updated system. Greets jre