Adam Hardy wrote:
andy on 11/04/07 20:45, wrote:
Adam Hardy wrote:
andy on 11/04/07 20:12, wrote:
John Hasler wrote:
If I wanted to remain current (w/out being bleeding-edge ala Sid),
would I now be adjusting my apt-sources-list to look for "testing"
rather than "etch" as they do now?
How risky is this on a workstation/desktop-&-music-&-Net box?
It depends how often you are going to do an across-the-board upgrade
of all your packages to stay current, and I guess it depends alot on
knowing what you are doing. I guess if you have to ask, you will end
up learning alot!
That's what happened to me. I stayed with etch through about 18
months of testing and found every 3 months I would encounter some
mind-bending problem concerning things I never knew existed. Would
spend an hour or a day sorting it out with help from this list and
elsewhere.
Adam, your response was quite provocative!
While I am fascinated by computers and have enjoyed my forays into
programming and networking I cannot claim to be anything more than a
user who would prefer a trouble-free computing experience, but isn't
afraid about getting my hands dirty if need's be. So, on this basis,
and noting that I have my trusty update manager doing all of the
nitty gritty for me, what am I realistically looking at if I adapt my
sources-list to "testing" (as they had been prior to Etch becoming
Etch)?
The plot thickens ... :)
Provocative? Not in a negative sense, I hope.
The issues that I ran into were all undoubtedly something that a
debian guru would not have had to deal with - I'm sure all the warning
signs were there but I just chose to ignore them or didn't recognise
them.
Since it happened on average every 3 months and I only had testing for
18, I guess that means it only happened 6 times in all.
It wasn't always the same thing, but one example that I remember was
with udev. I accidentally allowed a package to overwrite a config file
which I had edited, and I didn't see it happening.
So a couple of things wouldn't work anymore, but it was no great
disaster, in fact I didn't even realise straight away, which made the
diagnosis of the problem harder. It was because the config I used to
have was gone, and I had forgotten the details, since it was a couple
of months since I had put in the necessary config first time around.
I guess the moral of the story is, keep notes on all the changes you
make, and preferably, devote a bit of time to it.
I needed testing then for the new udev stuff which make it much easier
to synch my Palm, so I guess it was worth it.
Adam
Thanks Adam (& Greg :) ), Andrew C, and all of the rest for your
comments. I'll leave the sources list as they are for a couple of weeks
and then may well adjust the "etch" part to testing and hang on tight ...
Cheers all
/@
--
"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the
answers." - Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"
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