> Well, that is OP fault. Running sid/testing requires a minimal knowledge
> about what is going on, and often waiting for conflicts to be fixed by
> updated packages instead of removals.
>
It depends. Since we're not born knowing how the Debian ecosystem works, it's
unreasonable to expect a curious newcomer to understand the risks on the sid or
unstable branches. Ironically, I use testing because I had major driver
problems when I started using Debian back in 2004, so I was told to use
testing to get the usable drivers and a bootable system - since "stable" was
apparently not.
My ancient experience in reporting bugs against stable is "Sucks to be you.
Maybe we'll fix it in the next stable release. Maybe not." So at least on
testing there's a chance my problem will get fixed in a timely manner, or at
least I'll have plenty of warning to figure out a workaround - especially when
I rely on packages that get dropped between releases.
> Nothing I can do here.
>
Perhaps not, but whoever manages apt-get and/or aptitude should really have a
"here be dragons" warning when users select non-stable branches with a reminder
that they accept the risk of having an unbootable system after a dist-upgrade.
So "it depends" because if the user in question ignored explicit warnings
before dist-upgrading, then, yes, that's the user's fault. But if the user
dist-upgraded because they didn't know any better, that's a UI bug.
