On Tue 17 Aug 2021 at 16:19:48 (+0100), Brian wrote: > On Tue 17 Aug 2021 at 10:43:29 -0400, Michael Grant wrote:
> > 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. Where I would part company with that blog's philosophy is at "fallback to stable first, unstable second, and experimental last". Experimental as a fallback! The problem with following a blog is that it assumes you have a technical competence comparable with the author, and the confidence to go with it. I took a look at another rabexc story there, where they had a failing SSD that caused running dpkg to fail, but they needed smartmontools to examine the disk. So they just created /var/cache/apt in memory, downloadloaded and unpacked smartmontools, and ran the binary from there, without breaking sweat. Not for the faint of heart. Cheers, David.