> Ah, that would explain your confusion. 'apt-get upgrade' isn't what you > want, since as documented in the apt-get(8) man page it will not install > new packages. In particular, if you attempt to use 'apt-get upgrade' to > upgrade from stable to testing, it will refuse to upgrade libc6 because > of that package's new dependency on libdb1-compat, and therefore > virtually nothing else will be upgraded because it almost all depends on > the new libc6. Actually, it does attempt that when I prefer 'unstable' .. and it fails. I had to manually back that stuff out.
> Don't use 'apt-get upgrade' to upgrade from one version of the > distribution to the next. That said, it should have told you that some > big number of packages were being held back. Nope. "No updates are available" or whatever. > > Perhaps my product selections are biased: I really could care less about > > the latest and greatest desktop. They are pretty. But a browser that > > actually works is required to do my job, for example. > > Testing has a perfectly usable version of mozilla-firebird, which I'd > argue is a much better browser than plain mozilla. I might personally agree, but there are no production users of firebird. So we have to keep it around in a few places at least. > > Updates to the wireless drivers to improve device support would be > > useful. > > Kernel updates go in pretty quickly, as a rule. wireless-tools is up to > date in testing, and linux-wlan-ng is only a fraction behind unstable. Why isn't it showing me these? > > Stuff that has been safe and stable within Sid for over a year now > > (according to the package pages) still isn't appearing in testing. > > Examples, please? I'd be happy to look at them and see what I can do; I > can certainly explain what problems are involved. Perhaps related to above? Am I doing something wrong that I'm not seeing this stuff? > > In short, it appears that if one actually wants to use Debian as a > > desktop, one has no choice but to throw the debian guidelines out the > > window and run with unstable. > > I actually use Debian testing as a desktop, eight hours a day, five days > a week. It works great. > > > This means you lose commonality with any server 'stable' systems you > > might need to run. > > As far as commonality goes (although I don't quite understand what you > mean here), you should regard testing as closer to unstable in terms of > versions of software than to stable, because for the most part it is, > particularly in recent months. The general idea being that you could have an internal policy that no 'unstable' things are deployed on servers. I wouldn't mind running unstable on personal desktops, but if they diverge so far that there is a loss of commonality... -- Joe Rhett Chief Geek [EMAIL PROTECTED] Isite Services, Inc. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
