Early adopters bloodied by Ubuntu's Karmic Koala

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Nov 06, 2009 at 04:16:43PM -0500, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> | From: Thomas Milne <tbrucemilne-TcoXwbchSccMMYnvST3LeUB+6BGkLq7r at public.gmane.org>
> 
> | Running a mixed Testing and Unstable system, I've never experienced
> | one single serious breakage.
> 
> With Ubuntu, you are directed to run the latest version, with updates,
> or the latest LTS version, with updates.  That seems pretty simple.
> 
> Whenever people recommend Debian, the recipe seems more complicated.
> 
> Simple version:
> 
> - Run stable is you want stability (and movement at the rate of tectonic
>   drift).

Still faster than Ubuntu LTS though.

> - Run testing even though it may be unsafe.  Really, it is supposed to
>   be almost safe.
> 
> - Run unstable if you "like to live on the edge"

Which is still safer than many distributions' release versions.

> The actual recommendation from people I trust is  "run some mixture of these".

I rarely mix them, although occationally one or two packages backported
can be handy.

> How is one to know what mixture to run?  It seems like it would be a
> lot of work to figure this out correctly.
> 
> Oh, and another confusion: at any one time, stable and testing each
> have a name (of a character from Toy Story).  When a new stable
> release is released, the name of the old "testing" becomes the name of
> the new stable.  But unstable is always called Sid.  So new name is
> invented for testing.  At least I think that is how it works.

Yep.  That's the idea.

> I don't run Debian mostly because I don't know what mixture to run and
> I don't have to decide this with the distros I do use (CentOS, Fedora,
> and Ubuntu).
> 
> Continuous (as opposed to discontinuous) updating is attractive.
> Lennart seems to say that works with Debian, even when a new version
> becomes stable or testing.  But Lennart seems to be capable of easily
> solving problems that others find daunting.

Well the install I did in 1999 is still upgrading fine.  It has been
pointed at unstable at times, stable other times, testing sometimes.
Eventually everything ends up in stable so you can actually move to
stable eventually even if you are on unstable.

-- 
Len Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists