On Thu, Apr 12, 2007 at 07:14:00AM +0100, andy wrote: > So, for the benefit of this newbie: > > If I change my sources list to reflect "testing" rather than "etch", > will my system just automagically continue to upgrade itself? Will this > system - as it upgrades to Lenny - remain stable enough for daily use? > Yes - if you change it to either of lenny or testing - it will continue to upgrade itself. Because we released last Sunday, stable == testing at the moment, more or less - there hasn't been enough time for changes to start percolating down.
The next couple of months is likely to see significant changes in testing simply because: There's stuff that didn't make the cut for Etch release date. There's stuff in unstable that's been held up because people have not wanted to transition it to testing so that it didn't go into Etch inadvertently. People who've been concentrating on the freeze/release will now be able to go back to more active development. This may mean that, initially, stuff will break more readily / more often as large changes work their way through, If you can ride the initial wave of change at the moment then you can stay on testing more or less forever. There's a sweet spot: for the three months prior to release, I was suggesting that people doing new installs might want to install testing/etch now because it will release "Real Soon Now" and that way you spare the pain of a huge upgrade as the transition happens. Similarly, there's a rough spot for testing immediately after a stable release: then the curve flattens down over a period of months or years with less and less major change and more and more stability until next stable. Unstable doesn't have this curve - but, for me at least, it doesn't often break. Last week, I had two machines running testing and two running unstable. This week I have three running stable and one running testing. The mix will probably eventually be - 2 x stable, 1 x testing, 1 x unstable :) My desktop is normally unstable - but I may move back to testing for this. I regard the difference between stable, testing, unstable not in terms of abstract stability/instability but more in terms of how much package churn there is. Stable - no movement except security fixes - unconditionally solid. Testing - package change tends to move in waves. Major changes like KDE / Gnome tend to take a month at a time to propagate through. Usable 95% of the time with no problem - the rest may be a few updates held back for a while. Unstable - all bets are off in terms of how much change you can expect in a night :) Andy -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
