On Fri, 22 Jun 2012 13:55:55 -0400 Gary Dale <garyd...@rogers.com> wrote:
> You miss the point of sid. It's not a distribution the way Wheezy is. > It's a place to put packages for testing before they enter into the > general testing pool. Testing against sid is almost useless when you > really want to know if the package is ready for Wheezy. You may be thinking of Experimental. Both sid and testing are full usable distributions, testing being a rolling distribution some of the time, sid all of the time. Have a look at some random packages in the Debian list, and you will see that many are at the same version in both sid and testing. Packages that don't break badly in a mere ten days or so in sid are promoted to testing, if they are not new packages which arrived after the freeze. If sid and testing were significantly different, sid would be of no use for pre-testing the packages before moving them to the testing distribution. The overall environment must be pretty much the same. Once testing is frozen, they do diverge somewhat more, but sid still cannot be structurally altered in a way that would make it impossible to support testing. *That* happens immediately after release, when the new packages in sid held up by the testing freeze are moved quickly into testing, and sid is partly rebuilt toward the aims of the next release, while remaining a usable distribution at all times. Users of both distributions then live in interesting times for a month or so. > > If you run into a problem with a package from sid, you can say it > doesn't work with Wheezy. However, if your system is entirely sid, > all you can say it that it's not compatible with other sid packages. > Since those packages haven't been vetted for the next release, the > problem could be anywhere. > > Basic rule of problem resolution is change one thing at a time. When > you're running sid, everything changes all the time. > > No, not really. Updates are running about 100MB a day on my system, but that's still a small fraction of my installed packages. Even then, some software changes often, like LibreOffice, and most of the structure hardly changes at all. Debian isn't like Windows, it's not tightly 'integrated', as the MS marketing people like to say. Most individual packages can be upgraded in any order, and when a new version has a problem, it can be downgraded to the previous version. Where there are groups of packages which *are* integrated among themselves, then most of them cannot be upgraded until all are ready. But even here, choosing the upgrade order can allow some packages to be upgraded, and indeed there is sometimes a correct order to make the upgrade of the whole group. Where there is difficulty tracking down problems, it's something that will happen in every Linux distribution. Sound and vision are the prime examples, with both being dependent on many different packages, from hardware drivers down to udev. Looking only at the packages which have just been updated is not necessarily the answer, as a new version of one package may expose a hidden bug in another. Recently, I could no longer start Synaptic from its menu entry. This had been immediately caused by a new Synaptic version, but only because it now did something differently. The true cause is somewhere else entirely, possibly in GTK, or possibly GTK is giving me an error message because of a bug in something else entirely. -- Joe -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20120623101014.2c88b...@jretrading.com
