On Mon, Jul 11, 2005 at 11:01:29PM -0400, Carl Fink wrote: > On Mon, Jul 11, 2005 at 09:38:11PM -0500, Benjamin Sher wrote: > > > If I install the stable sarge release, and someone issues a new > > debian package for some application, how do you decide whether > > to install it or not? Does apt-get take care of all that > > automatically? > > In general, unless there are security problems with a package, it will NEVER > be upgraded in Stable (until there's a new version of the whole Debian > distribution). Stable is just that, "unchanging".
In principle, anyway. Stable does get updates occasionally, to fix bugs that could put your entire system at risk from, say, malicious strangers. But providing other kinds of upgrades (such as new features, new packages) would risk introducing bugs, and that's not tolerated in stable. Stable is good for systems that have to be up 24/7, have many users, which shouldn't go down for *anything*. I run sarge on my local server. I have to admit it does go down now and then -- for power supply problems and occasional hardware issues. When stable changed from woody to sarge, there were upgrade problems. I was very careful to make a *copy* of my woody partition and upgraded the copy. Then, when the upgrade failed (because I ran out of disk space) I was able to reboot to the old system and continue running. I made another copy on another, much larger partition, and upgraded that. During the upgrade sessions, my users didn't notice anything unusual, by the way, except my occasional reboot to boot to the copy. Despite the troubles, I was quite pleased with the upgrade process. I've never had the same ease of upgrade with Windows, for example. In fact, the last time I had to reinstall Windows I was completely unsuccessful. The time before I succeeded only because I used Linux to make a backup copy of the partially installed Windows every time it requested a reboot. The Windows installer just kept crashing! So I'm quite conservative on my server. Although I run stable, my apt-sources does not specify "stable" It specifies "sarge" rught now, and "woody" a few months ago. That way I have control over when the upgrade occurs. I can pick a time when no essential projects are going on (just in case). On my production machine, I ran sarge as testing for about a year now, and I haven't updraded to etch yet. I normally maintain a dual-boot configuration with a choice of stable or testing. At the moment my woody system (which was stable) won't access the net, presumably becuse it doesn't have the drivers needed avter my lates motherboard upgrade. This is probably more information than you want. My summary: If you want utter stability, use stable. If you want to keep up with current events, with enough of a delay that there's a reasonable chance thet the things actually work, use testing. If you want to help debug Debian, use sid. In any case, once you've intstalled your system, make sure your sources.list file specifies the actual name (woody, sarge, etch, sid) of your distribution instead of ist status (stable, testing, unstable) so you have some say in just when the big upgrades take place. > > To get upgrades before the next Debian version is released, you'd need to > either use Testing or Unstable, or go outside the "main" Debian repository. > Places like backports.org and apt-get.org package stuff for Stable that's > newer than the official release, but using them adds some complexity to > administering the computer. I've found backporst.org to be quite useful. -- hendrik -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
