Oliver Jones wrote:
Hi folks.
I'm just trying to find out what peoples feelings are with regard to the testing & unstable branches of Debian. I've added testing to my deb and deb-src lines in /etc/apt/sources.list. Mainly because I wanted a newer version of a package I use.
I'd like to know A) if this is advisable B) if going all the way to unstable is advisable. What are the security patch repercussions?
I use unstable on my desktop at home. it doesn't run anything at all important, so I don't mind if it doesn't work, however I've never had any major issues with it, occasionally a few packages end up in funny states (you have a package with version n, and the dev package for n-1, so apt will refuse to let you upgrade either), but I usually just wait 24 hours then repeat the upgrade and everythings fine. I've never had problems with it interfering with my work. I would however recommend deb-listbugs and deb-changelog packages, they will warn you about any major problems/changes when you install/upgrade a package. I'm supposed to use aptitude, I don't, I use apt. The major difference (afaik) is that aptitude installs recommended packages by default, so I tend to manually install recommended packages myself.