On Tue 17 Aug 2021 at 10:43:29 -0400, Michael Grant wrote: > > some people have different goals than i. > > You're correct. Though I do have a primary goal to have a stable > system, I sometimes (albeit it's rare) I need to install package > that's not in stable, or I need some feature from a more recent > version of something which is why backports is important to me.
I wonder what you mean by "stable" system? In a Debian context it means "unchanging". You cannot have a stable system with a testing or unstable line in sources.list. The best-effort backports should be OK. All the packages there are built on stable. A single package from testing or unstable may be OK, but if it brings in other packages I'd think twice about it, especially if it involves the infrastructure of the system. > Up to now, I have been running Testing which has served me pretty > well. I've been convinced by discussion here to move to Stable + > Backports. Sounds like a good plan. > I included Experimental which probably was a mistake and I probably > meant Unstable. (I can see Greg rolling his eyes...) > > Here's a blog post I was looking at: https://rabexc.org/posts/apt-config > > This is very close, if not exactly, what I want to do. I'm very aware > about mixing releases. If you ever do this, you need to be very > careful not to suck in a ton of dependencies. Greg is correct, you > can at the click of a key unwittingly install so many dependencies > that your system becomes that release. You really appear to have it sorted now. -- Brian.
