On Thursday 18 March 2004 17:31, Brian Nelson wrote:
However, testing tends to be more broken than unstable. Testing works well right now since we're near a release and almost everything in there is in a releasable state, but after sarge releases, watch out.
I'm sure I'm missing something here. I would expect that the Testing version becomes more unstable after the current Sid becomes the Testing version (which is why I wouldn't update from Sarge to ??? for a few months).
Just to clarify, this never happens. The same progression rules from sid->testing that occur now are always in effect. There is never a day when every package in sid gets into testing. When sarge releases, it will be identical to testing for a day or two and then testing will slowly change.
But are
you *REALLY* saying that the new Testing version will be more unstable than the new Unstable version?? Something seems wrong with that picture.
I use testing and am perfectly happy with it. It does require a certain degree of acumen to know when to pull certain packages from unstable and when to sit tight and not do anything, but you get used to it[ie late last year I had GNOME on hold for a long time until the 1.4->2.x transition finished]. In my experience, testing breaks in one of two ways: Something is uninstallable because dependencies are screwy, because something was forced into testing ora package has been removed from testing. Once you have everything installed, this can't be a problem since an installed package by definition can't be uninstallable. A corollary to this is that an upgrade will try to remove packages, so don't do the upgrade. In other words you are given ample warning of the 'breakage'. The other problem is security and other 'critical' fixes, well worst comes to worst you can always grab the packages from unstable[either recompile/or install the unstable dependencies as well] so in this regard testing can't be worse than unstable.
Unstable, on the other hand, breaks much more spectacularly on package installation with no warning other than people moaning on the lists/IRC/BTS. I don't want to imply that this is a frequent occurence, but it does happen...
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