The Temptation of Unstable

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sun, Apr 05, 2009 at 07:26:11PM -0400, JoeHill wrote:
> Just looking at a post on Debian Users about someone running Squeeze, and I see
> they've got XFCE 4.6 available to them, among other things.
> 
> This is very very tempting. My sources.list is already pointing to Unstable, I
> just can't bring myself to run the upgrade. I used to use Mandriva, so, you
> know... ;)
> 
> I guess what I'm hoping is that someone will convince me to take the rather
> risky step of updating from Testing to Unstable on my one home machine.
> 
> Especially if someone's running unstable, I would like to hear about the major
> and minor pitfalls, if any.

Well I run unstable on my desktop and mythtv box at home.  unstable of
course is Sid.  Squeeze is the testing release that will be the next
stable release.

So unstable will occationally break.  If it does, it expects you to know
enough to fix it if it is really bad.  Or at least be willing to wait
a day or two for the problem to be resolved.  It is pretty rare for
something that bad to happen.  Usually the main problems are transitions,
where half of a new gnome release has made it in, but the other half is
still old, and the upgrade simply doesn't know where to go and either
refuses to upgrade anything (the good option) or decides to upgrade half
and remove the other half (usually not a nice option).

The 2.6.29 kernel recently hit unstable, and unfortunately for those
using external kernel modules a Makefile for i386 was left out, so you
can't compile modules on i386.  amd64 and other work fine though.
Simple to fix yourself though if you know how.

I believe there is a wiki somewhere that shows the current state of
debian unstable and has warnings about major problems which can tell
you when you probably don't want to do an upgrade.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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