dpkg error on apt-get upgrade

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 03:30:19PM -0400, Dave Mason wrote:
> 
> On Oct 21, 2010, at 14:59, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> 
> > If you run unstable you see it occationally.  In testing it should almost
> > never happen.  Certainly in stable it does not happen.
> 
> This is something I've been wondering... I guess it's quite reasonable to run unstable.  The Debian releases page says about unstable:
> 
> > run by developers and those who like to live on the edge.
> 
> If I'm using a relatively special (limited) install this seems like it would be fairly reasonable.  I think rather than "unstable" I'd put "sid" in my /etc/apt/sources.list so that I would track that as it moved, eventually, to stable.

It won't.  sid == unstable.  Remember in toy story sid is the kid next
door that destroys toys.  So sid is where things may be broken.  sid is
also not a toy.  All the Debian releases are named after toys in toy
story.

The way it works is that when a new release happens, it changes
from testing to stable.  A copy of the new stable then becomes the
new testing with a new name, and packages from unstable continue to
trickle in if they stay relatively bug free as development progresses.
Some packages may never leave unstable if they never become bug free
enough.  So sid/unstable will never become a release.

The last release to come from unstable being turned into stable was
potato (Debian 2.2).  It was so slow and painful that they invented the
'almost always stable' testing concept to keep very broken things out
of the way of getting a release done.  It was a good change.

The next testing name after squeeze is released has already been decided,
although I can't remember what it is right now.

> To move to sid, I found a page that said to add:
> 
> 	deb http://mirrors.kernel.org/debian/ sid main contrib non-free
> 
> to sources.list and then:
> 
> 	apt-get update && apt-get upgrade
> 
> *Then* do I remove all the references to lenny from my sources.list file?  I have a later kernel from backports; will that be upgraded too? 

-- 
Len Sorensen
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