[wellylug] Debian and latest XFree86

Richard Hector rhector at paradise.net.nz
Thu Jun 5 23:54:45 NZST 2003


On Thu, Jun 05, 2003 at 09:59:08PM +1200, Andrew Garrett wrote:
> On Thu, 5 Jun 2003 20:58:23 +1200
> Richard Hector <rhector at paradise.net.nz> wrote:
> 
> 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.

OK if you know the machine is behind a firewall (which laptop doesn't imply
to me - my laptop is the box that gets plugged in all over the place)

> > 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 :)

I'll let you win that one :-) It's probably a significant reason for our
different attitudes - I'm less confident I can fix a screwup, so I try not
to let it happen (so I guess I get less experience ...).

> 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.

OK - that's one of the examples I gave for using something newer. It's a bit
pointless developing for old libs.

> 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.  

Maybe - I'd be doing the upgrades though.

> 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.

I'd rather go with as little of the less stable stuff as poss. Just my take.
And I'd avoid either for open services. X doesn't listen on the network (by
default), so I don't mind that, but I'd try to avoid using that as an excuse
to u/g the whole lot includind sshd and exim, for example. I also try to pick
backports whose maintainers' names I recognise as having a good reputation.

> 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)

Yes - though somebody (reputable, though I can't remember the name) posted a
warning on debian-user a while ago that this was not a silver bullet, and
could have nasty consequences - it gets messy when the sarge package depends
on a newer version of libc than is in woody - people have accidentally
half-upgraded their systems, and it can be hard to undo.

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

The Original Poster == Peter Milne (from combining his signoff with his email;
apologies Peter if I got that wrong)

I figure if somebody's asking (which I think on reflection he wasn't,
exactly ...), I'll suggest woody. :-)

Richard




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