Question about Debian Unstable & Stable

[Jason Spiro]

On 5/30/06, William O'Higgins Witteman <william.ohiggins-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> I use testing on a couple of my machines, and I find it a nice balance
> between "everything-changing-all-the-time-latest-and-greatest-craziness"
> of unstable and the "everything-works-I'm-stuck-with-two-year-old-
> features" of stable.  Testing has security updates, so you are generally
> losing nothing.
>
> When I want something new and exciting what I'll do is change my
> /etc/apt/sources.list to draw from unstable, then do an "apt-get update"
> and then an "apt-get install $SHINY_NEW_THING" and then change my
> sources.list back to testing.  The shiny new thing (most recently Vim
> 7.0, very spiffy) is essentially pinned until testing catches up to that
> version, and then everything moves forward together.  Generally though,
> testing has everything I want in it.

Reviving an old thread I found via Gmail's excellent search functionality...

Would this work? I have never tried it.

1. Put testing first in your sources.list, then stable, then unstable

2. Set up /etc/apt/preferences so that the priorities are testing,
then stable, then unstable (see man apt_preferences for details)

3. When you install an app, it would come from testing when possible,
otherwise stable, unless you did a command like apt-get -t unstable
install vim

4. ...

5. Profit!

Any thoughts?

Regards,
Jason
Please CC me on replies.

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