On Sun, 20 Jun 2004 12:15:59 -0500 Michael Satterwhite <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Sunday 20 June 2004 11:47, Chris Metzler wrote: > > You're right that this happened recently with KDE in unstable. What > > you're not aware of is that something similar happened last year with > > KDE in testing. More specifically, last year, KDE was uninstallable > > in testing for *several months*. > > Whoa!! > > You're right, I *DIDN'T* know that. I may need to rethink things. > > Debian Stable isn't a good choice for me; packages running nearly 2 > years old aren't a good thing. > > Now I'm hearing that the current testing branch may not work either - > and it's a given that the unstable won't from time to time. > > How did you handle this?
First of all, I handled it without any difficulty whatsoever because
I don't use KDE.
Most of the people tracking testing at that time who were bitten
simply changed their sources.list to as if they tracked unstable,
but only for the moment. They upgraded KDE, and KDE only, to the
versions in unstable. Then, they backed their sources.list down
to testing, and continued to track testing. Eventually, things
sorted out.
But this kind of thing happens often to testing when it's not near
release. Right now, tracking testing is pretty safe, because the
sarge release is (comparatively) not that far away. I don't know
what the RC-bug status right now; but the main holdup on sarge has
been the new installer, and everything I've read suggests that's
close to finish. So sarge is not too far away from release, and
so most of the stuff in sarge is in pretty good shape (one possible
exception is GNOME 2.6, which is filtering down to testing from
unstable right now, but isn't all there yet; I dunno how robust its
partially-complete status it is in testing currently). But when
sarge is farther from release, things can get very broken, and
stay that way for quite some time.
The problems that afflict unstable from time to time are almost
always problems that can be recovered from fairly straightforwardly,
if you know what you're doing. The issue is not the system, but
the user/admin -- whether the user/admin can do those things to
downgrade a broken package etc.
-c
--
Chris Metzler [EMAIL PROTECTED]
(remove "snip-me." to email)
"As a child I understood how to give; I have forgotten this grace since I
have become civilized." - Chief Luther Standing Bear
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