[wellylug] Debian and latest XFree86

[Andrew Garrett]

On Thu, 5 Jun 2003 20:58:23 +1200
Richard Hector <rhector at paradise.net.nz> wrote:

All very valid points, and I disagree with nothing that you say.

> 
> Remember that the stability referred to isn't the software itself; it's
> the dependencies, and how often the software changes. And testing gets its
> fair share of changes, some of which can break things quite severely.
> Often this is only for a short time, such as while a new version of libc
> comes out and the rest of the packages take a while to catch up, but if
> that's when you happen to do an upgrade, it can leave you with quite a
> mess. And not only do you need a few hours to fix things, you need a few
> clues about how the system works.
> 
> Another point is that the security team produce fixes for security bugs in
> stable, but not unstable.

Personally, I don't tend to upgrade testing/unstable boxes that often - they
generally sit behind firewalls, so I'm not as concerned with the security
side of things, and my desire for bleeding edge software isn't that great. 
In this case (given that the machine in question is a laptop) I'd be quite
happy with running something that doesn't have as much attention paid to
security as Woody does at the moment.

> 
> Personally, though I've been running debian for a couple of years, and on
> several boxes, I'm more comfortable with stable.

4+ years, and counting the servers would be a futile exercise in
one-upmanship :)  For a long time, I was spending part of my time doing php
development, and php was evolving too fast to wait for stable to catch up.  
I got into the habit of being a bit more bleeding edge there.

All a matter of what you need. Servers, I'm very comfortable with stable. 
Workstations for myself, I'm happy with sid.  If I was setting up a
workstation for someone else, and stable offered everything needed, stable
would be just fine, but I wouldn't be adverse to going to Sarge if I saw a
need.  

I'd rather go to a distribution that's actively maintained by a group than a
backport which may or may not be, even if that has possible upgrade issues.

However... I may have an answer to the original question, at least in part. 
In this case, if Peter would prefer to keep most of his system on Stable,
but get X from Sarge....

http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/apt-howto/ch-apt-get.en.html#s-default-version

(I knew this was possible, I'd just never looked into it before)

> 
> Well, I don't know the OP, so I won't back that.

where OP==?

> 
> YMMV
> 

It may, and it probably will :)


Andrew

-- 
Andrew Garrett           Analysis and Design          andrew at redspider.co.nz
Red Spider Ltd   Quality Open Source Engineering     http://redspider.co.nz/
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