Greetings, all. I've got a fair amount (5-6 yrs) of GNU/Linux experience under my belt, but I've only been using Debian for about a year now; I'd previously used RedHat and Slackware. I've been running stable to give myself a chance to get used to the Debian Way. A number of folks have suggested that I upgrade myself to either testing or unstable, and I'm beginning to see the benefits in doing that. (Primarily, I'm not terribly wild about relying on Ximian for all of my GNOME apps.)
Before I do the upgrade, though, I'd like to ask for advice on general tactics people use for running testing or unstable and still maintaining a mostly usable system. I know breakages will happen from time to time, but I'd like to minimize their impact as much as reasonable. Basically, I don't mind spending a little bit of time and energy dealing with issues, but I'd prefer to use my computer primarily to get useful work done, rather than constantly tweaking the OS and packaging system. So, what I already know: * Know the packaging tools. Besides just reading the man pages for apt, dpkg, and dselect, are there any other places I should go for information? * I know how to do the upgrade (edit /etc/apt/sources.list, then apt-get update ; apt-get dist-upgrade); I'm mostly interested in methods for maintaining the system after it's been upgraded. What I'm not clear on: * If a particular package breaks, it would be useful to roll back to the last working version of that package (where possible). Trick is, this requires having the last working version of the package available for install somewhere. Do the Debian download servers maintain old versions of the package files, or would I have to keep copies of them all locally? * I've heard a couple of things that suggest that it's possible to run testing, with the exception of a few packages from unstable. Is this true? If so, how? Obviously, I could do this by manually downloading the unstable .debs, but I'd prefer to have apt/dselect keep track of all this for me. (Otherwise, I'm back to RedHat---automatic upgrades were one of the major reasons I switched to Debian.) Any other advice would be more than welcome. Thanks in advance, Richard
