Re: Sid/Unstable

On Thu, Nov 08, 2007 at 07:52:15PM -0800, Jeff Grossman <jeff@xxxxxxxxxxx> was heard to say:
I know this question is going to get a variety of answers, but I would like
to get everybody's opinion. I am currently running Testing with a few
packages from Sid. I just moved to Debian a few weeks ago. I am running
Debian as a home server which handles a website, e-mail server, samba
server, a few other small server applications. I am really the only user
except for e-mail, I have about 4 users total on the system. More than
anything running Linux is a complete learning experience for me. I have
noticed that it takes at least 10 days, if not more, to get updated
packages from unstable to testing. How dangerous would it be for me to
move completely to unstable? Has anybody completely trashed their system
by running unstable? I like to live on the cutting edge, but I also don't
want my machine to completely die where it won't boot up anymore.

I've run unstable on at least one of my machines for 8 years. My
experience is that it works fine almost all the time. Oh, and one or two
times a year some "little" thing goes wrong. PAM gets upgraded and
decides no password you enter is valid. The kernel loses track of your
hard drives. An upgrade to the bootloader hoses your initrd. A common
library changes SONAME without changing its package name, breaking
everything that depends on it. The X server is upgraded and wrecks your
display configuration. A libc upgrade breaks everything in sight (or
better yet, only breaks a few things in subtle ways it takes you weeks
to even notice, generating corrupt data the whole time). A change in
the network subsystem means your Internet connection mysteriously fails
to work. etc, etc, etc.

With the exception of the subtle libc corruption, all of these have
happened to me at one time or another. If you can't tolerate and recover
from one of these events, I would not recommend running unstable.

Daniel


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