On Sun, Feb 04, 2007 at 05:49:17PM -0500, Michael Pobega wrote: > I'm currently using Debian Etch (Testing) on my notebook, and it is > fairly stable in a good sense of the word (Those 100+ release critical > bugs really aren't bugs that affect me, so my system is perfectly stable > to my knowledge). > > The only problem I'm seeing with Etch is that the packages are somewhat > outdated, and certain "bugged" packages aren't available on the repos > (Checkinstall for an example).
Reading this post and the replies from the others so far, I am wondering why apt-pinning never came up. Maybe I have overread. Is this practice deprecated by aptitude or some other new mechanisms? Anyway I used it for some packages by the time that Woody was stable but too old for some of my needs. Also being more or less a newbie I wanted to keep as much as possible from the stable branch. So I went for the pinning solution and got a setup which involved all 3 distributions. I.e. Firefox was pinned to unstable, as I wanted security fixes ASAP, or jackd was pinned to testing as it already passed Sid which implies a certain degree of stability and still the package was newer than the stable version. Such setup is not free of side effects. I can remember, when firefox from Sid suddenly depended on a new version of libc6, I was forced to make a decision, whether to hold firefox at its current version, downgrade to the stable version, use the upstream version or do a dist-upgrade to testing since (as far as I can remember from prior readings) an upgrade of libc6 would be kind of like a dist-upgrade. My point is, if you only miss a small amount of packages you might consider such a solution as a stable yet not completely "outdated" Debian. Used with care and some common sense it can save you from pulling to much from the not so stable distibutions, also reducing the number of upgrades. (If I'd known how *often* upgrades happen in testing I probably wouldn't run etch already, but I felt brave in a weak minute ;). I would like to point to the HOWTO I found on the web that time, but I cannot find it now. :( But the following docs may suffice as well: http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/apt-howto/ch-apt-get.en.html#s-default-version 3.8 and 3.10 were my starter, 3.9 I ignored since I did not get the point in doing so. With proper set pins it just requires a "aptitude update && aptitude dist-upgrade". Also see "man apt_preferences". Just my 2ยข Regards Marcus
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