Anyway, regarding my original concern and my ideas, I have reached a few conclusions.
In my own case, I figure I'll probably either be running Sid or Ubuntu Feisty. I gave etch+rolling my own backports a try, but backporting each package was a throwback to the Debian Hamm (i.e. pre-apt) days - I was often having to manually resolve dependencies due to the fact that I didn't want to pull them *all* from stable or *all* from unstable - I wanted to pull the minimum necessary from unstable and the rest from stable when building. Also, it seemed like I'd have to backport 50-odd packages to get the functionality I'm looking for on my system - and I'd still only have Gnome 2.14... >From my own experience, it seems like the issue that needs to be fixed to make stable more viable for end-users is to have automated, dependency-resolving, backporting functionality in apt. Essentially, one command would grab all build-deps that it can from stable, backport the rest from unstable/testing, and then build and install the package from unstable (or testing) source, cleaning up for itself when finished. In short - think the best of apt and the best of BSD ports all rolled together in one I may think this over, sketch out some plans, and look into implementation. However, as my actual programming experience is mostly limited to what I've done in CS (C and C++, but no extensive usage of libs other than the standard C and C++ libs, though some Qt), I don't expect miracles. I do plan on helping to bring this about, though... Even if I go with Ubuntu Feisty, I still plan on working with Debian on this and some other issues. I'll just keep multiple build environments around. I could still decide to just go back to the closed-source world (in my case, OS X - not Windows), but I want to move over this time (i've tried probably 4 or 5 times...) The only thing holding me up is laptop power management support and the old standby, multimedia. Thanks once again to all the Debian developers... Tim > >
