Rick Macdonald wrote: > > Tommy wrote: > > > > When I upgraded the package lists of > > stable, unstable, contrib, and non-free dselect ... > > This is something that I've always wondered about. Can you actually tell > dselect about both stable and unstable at the same time? I've always > been afraid to do that.
I'm doing that now and have been for awhile. :-) I had apt setup to get hamm+slink (when slink was unstable), and then went to slink+potato (slink is frozen and potato is unstable). The only advantage is getting access to the latest versions of software, but that advantage comes with a price. Because often unstable really *is* unstable, and you can end up after an upgrade with a badly broken system, or at least a very confused one. This can occur because at any one time, unstable could be completely broken by, for example, a new package that has been uploaded that turns out to have a bug which interferes with other packages. In addition, I went through a problem recently with GNOME. 2 weeks or so ago, an upgrade mysteriously broke GNOME. I know nothing about the inner workings of GNOME, so I ended up living with the problem until a few days ago when another upgrade mysteriously fixed the problem. I agree it is dangerous; you have to decide for yourself whether the access to the latest stuff is worth the trouble of having to deal with sometimes bizarre problems that will occasionally occur. -- Ed C.