How stable is Debian Unstable?

[Christopher Browne]

I used to, back in the days when it was rather more exciting than today.
(Remember when Perl broke, and forced rolling upgrades back?).  After the
Perl troubles, the project got more careful, and occurrences have been
pretty rare since.

I'm mostly on testing, these days, with occasional unstable overrides.

I wouldn't expect the difference to make much difference today,
particularly for the scenario you describe.

For "desktop" packages, which I think it is reasonable to assume the
Gnomes, KDEs, and GTks of the world, things don't just dribble in
piecemeal.  Rather, they do releases, e.g. a new version of KDE, and they
enter not as a package, into unstable, but rather as a whole stream of
packages, into experimental.  Only after they are seen to play well there
do they get into unstable.  So what you get there are pretty chunky
updates.  Particularly for desktoppy packages.

You only get rapid changes streaming into Debian when you select something
directly tracking SCM-based versions.  And that tends to require conscious
choice.  E.g. I want bleeding edge GNU Emacs, I'll add the dev repo to my
/etc/apt sources.  Emacs 24 only entered Debian unstable pretty late in the
process, when the Emacs devs were preparing the version 24 release.
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