On Fri, 2005-09-16 at 23:45 +1000, 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
It's not advisable to mix stable / testing entries in sources.list without taking in other action to protect your system from harm. The testing entries will end up being favoured over the stable entries as the packages have newer version and you'll end up with basically a testing system with a bit of stable thrown in here and there. In other words a mess! There are ways around this, you can "pin" packages, and explicitly set the priority of testing to lower than that of stable. This means all packages are installed from stable (regardless of whether a newer version is available) unless you explicitly tell apt to install the package from testing. Notes on all this can be found at http://www.wlug.org.nz/AptNotes Pinning doesn't always work however, particularly in the case where you want to install a package that depends on a newer version of libc or some other crucial library. In these cases it is easier to do as has already been suggested and use a backport. Either one from a third party backport repository, or one that you've compiled yourself. HTH. Regards -- Matt Brown matt(a)mattb.net.nz Mob +64 275 611 544 www.mattb.net.nz